An autoethnography of accounting knowledge production: Serendipitous and fortuitous choices for understanding our social world

Autoethnographies of the doing of research in accounting are relatively scarce. This paper reconstructs the process of theorising and the many serendipitous and fortuitous choices made when learning in the field and from the actual experiences involved in the designing and completing of an accounting research enquiry. It is concerned with such questions as: how do particular interests arise? How and why is a theory constructed? How one gradually learns to better observe and operate in the researching field? Explicitly, the paper reflects upon the process of (re)searching and complements the argument that a multifaceted interdependency exists within a research discourse community. That is, there is a complex interdependency between the researcher(s) and the researched; theoretical, methodological and methodical choices made and changed; the specific context(s) of the research project. Implicitly, through the discussions and illustrations, suggestions are also made about desirable changes in research style and in the focus of accounting knowledge more generally.