Commentary on Parker: Groundhog Day and optimism

This paper seeks to provide a supportive commentary to the paper by Lee Parker that assesses the deliverables and relevance of qualitative accounting research. This commentary on Parker's work focuses more narrowly than Parker and concentrates on the differences between qualitative research and approaches adopting a positivistic or normative perspective and less on the exemplars in the management accounting literature. The commentary will seek to explore these differences by reverting to a broader social science literature. The commentary will argue for recognising the complementarity of different research approaches – recognising difference and but recognising the strengths of both; bringing their understandings together when it helps to do so, but not seeking to combine them and ignore their difference roots; not seeking to privilege any approach over any other apart from recognising that different questions need different approaches to answer them. At the latter end of this commentary I offer some solutions that might be considered in relation to the building of a body of knowledge, using the ideas of middle range thinking. Finally I develop some suggestions to meet for Parker's call for us to make efforts to communicate more broadly and argue for the academic accounting community to consider interdisciplinary engagement with the arts.