Law professors do it–they do it with appeal. Economists do it–with demand and supply. If accounting professors did it (they don’t), they would be certified to do it. Why don’t accounting professors do it?
We’re talking about blogging, of course. This essay follows Accounting Professors Who Blog, where I provide links to the ten accounting professors who currently blog. Figuring out why accounting professors shun it is the subject of today’s essay.
Basics of Blogging and a Short History
What is a blog? Blogging is similar to the centuries-old practice of
keeping a diary or regularly writing thoughts on paper and binding the
pages into a journal or notebook. A blog is a web site where an author
(or team of authors) writes or comments on an issue or several related
issues. Additional comments are added on a regular or semi-regular
basis. Every time a blogger adds to the web site, it is called
posting. Blogs can be personal, about professional topics, or about
current news events. There are several web sites devoted to providing the means for bloggers to do their thing.
Blog is the popular permutation of web log. According to Rebecca Blood, the term blog was created in 1997 when Peter Merholz rearranged the letters of web log into wee blog. Soon thereafter, the noun form of blog was altered into a verb. [Transforming nouns into verbs is great fun. Betamax, a videocassette recorder, means to be made obsolete when used as a verb].
Of course, blogging started before there was a term for it. There are several online histories of blogging [1 2 3 4]. They all pretty much say the same thing. Blogs started in 1992 or 1993 and early on were web pages (with updating) containing histories of favorite web sites. By 1997 or 1998, software was available to automate the posting, obviating the need for bloggers to be html coders. By this time, people had started blogging about personal or professional thoughts, incorporating images and audio files and video files whenever deemed appropriate.
Some consider early Usenet groups and e-mail list groups to be antecedents of blogging. Some consider e-mail lists to be equivalent to blogging, just done via e-mail instead of being posted to web pages. Of course, people have been writing journals for centuries, they just were doing it on paper instead of online.
The practice of blogging grew rapidly. Eventually the number of active blogs peaked at 100,000,000. As blogs become inactive, new bloggers take their place.
Why Blog?
Typepad, one of the blog-hosting companies, posts these reasons to blog. I don’t think they provide much motivation, but then, it’s difficult to get me excited.
- A blog is a simple, cost-effective way to create a professional online presence.
- A blog creates a conversation between you and the people who matter to you.
- A blog is a tremendous way to boost your search engine rankings.
- A blog delivers a huge impact for very little money.
- A blog allows you to take control of what you publish.
- A blog allows you to develop a position of thought leadership.
- A blog is a valuable business tool for collecting customer feedback.
- A blog creates a historical record of your content.
At the core of blogging, it is all about personal expression. It is about making a contribution where the writer describes who and why he or she is. Sandhill Trek as a nice piece–Why do we blog?– where many bloggers contribute their thoughts as to why they blog.
But more to the point of this essay, why should professors blog? Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, has two nice pieces entitled, Encouraging Educators to Blog, and Some More Reasons to Blog. He has done such a good job of justifying the items compiled into his list, that I’m going to shamelessly paste them verbatim into this essay. Weller, take it away:
- The economics of reputation – increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
- Engagement with your subject area – in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
- Increased reflection – keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.
- Personal status and payback – being a recognised blogger in any field is likely to raise your profile and thus lead to increased requests for participation in projects, key note speeches, consultancy, invited papers, etc.
- Organisational status – as an institution the OU is not as prominent in the blogosphere as it should be. While company blogs tend to be rather bland, there is a positive image and potentially student recruitment effect for the institution if there are known to be a number of good bloggers in residence.
- Link to teaching – the type of content used in courses is increasingly diverse, and one model for including up to date information is to have feeds from a number of blogs incorporated in to teaching material.
- Eating our own dog food – increasingly students are encouraged to use blogs in courses, and so we should be demonstrating how they can be effective.
- It exposes the process – much of the community of practice theory argues that being able to participate in a community novices should be able to observe, and to an extent participate with, experts in action. A blog is good means of allowing others to observe some of the less well thought out ideas and ongoing projects of an academic. This applies to both students and other members of staff, as Christopher Semmus argues, blogging represents a good model for mentoring within a university. James Aczel has started a blog for his course H809 during production, which will reveal many of the design decisions taken in the course, and potentially be a useful resource for future students on the course.
- It provides a useful tool for engaging with other technologies – the array of web 2.0 technologies can be quite daunting. However, many of these relate to blogging, and so by keeping a blog one is exposed to these technologies in a meaningful context. The technology required to keep a blog is fairly simple to use, so it is easy to get started, and then once your blog has momentum you may wish to explore some of the related tools and technologies. For instance Technorati is a site for ranking blogs, so you may want to claim your blog in here, and Feedburner is a means of allowing people to subscribe easily to your blog, while Slideshare allows people to embed their powerpoint presentations within their blog postings, and so on. By keeping a blog there is a motivation and a means to engage with many of the newer technologies that have potential benefits for our students.
- It’s a good means of getting down, or building up, all those thoughts that never quite get in to journal papers. Either because journals are too restrictive (they’ll want lots of data for any claim you make), or because you never get around to it, but I know that I for one, have an idea (or maybe it’s an idealet) every day (okay maybe every week – month? go, on year then), which never finds an outlet and is then lost. The blog is a good means of capturing these, and over time they may find their way in to something more research recognisable.
All of these reasons could appeal to accounting professors. But there is an important additional reason for accounting professors to blog, stated so insightfully by Steven Muzatko, Associate Professor of Accounting at University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. Professor Muzatko says that each entry in an academic blog can be a think piece. Think pieces, for him, are not only interesting, but also important. He was attracted into academic accounting because of its history of publishing such pieces in The Accounting Review and other journals. Unfortunately, very few think pieces have been publshed since 1970.
In some academic disciplines, blogging is becoming very popular. In law, medicine, economics, education and literature there is a growing expectation that professors will blog as part of their normal set of duties. In law, especially, blogging is very common. But not so in the academic discipline of accounting.
Why Accounting Professors Don’t Blog
As was seen in my first essay on blogging, Accounting Professors Who Blog, the practice of blogging is not common among accounting professors. There are only ten and one of these is written by a retired professor who has become a consultant. Why isn’t blogging a common practice for accounting professors?
The first reason for few blogs by academic accountants is that blogging simply doesn’t count as scholarship. The major accrediting agency–AACSB– pretty much controls most aspects of the largest colleges/schools/departments of business. AACSB defines the basic qualification for teaching in one of their schools to be mastery of content as evidenced by recent refereed journal articles. If it isn’t refereed, then it doesn’t count. And if it doesn’t count, then it isn’t rewarded. Period. As long as the AACSB tightly rules the academic world of business and accounting, it will be difficult for many business professors to be motivated enough (financially) to crank out a blog. The ACBSP (accrediting body for smaller colleges and departments of business) also stresses refereed journal articles.
Now, I personally define scholarship as insightful contributions by an expert who has near total command of a subject matter’s content and who has sufficient experience to develop a wise world view that produces thoughts that are of interest to others. For me, a piece has to be valuable for it to be scholarhsip. I think there are multiple outlets for scholarship. A few years back, Ernest Boyer proposed a model with four types of scholarship. Although Boyer talks about the natural outlet for the scholarship of discovery being publications, he does recognize the potential for other types of outlet. Boyer’s way of thinking has not yet made it to AACSB controlled colleges/schools/departments of business. A refereed publication need not contain scholarship but will still count, and non-referee published scholarship does not count.
A second reason for little blogging by accounting academics is that the discipline is dysfunctional after years of control by a network of elite schools that emphasize accountics. Jean Heck and Bob Jensen provide support for this in their incredibly valuable and insightful paper, “An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by The Accounting Review, 1926-2005″ in The Accounting Historians Journal, December 2007. In their paper, Heck and Jensen chronicle the ascendency and dominance of the accountics model for accounting research and publication. Accountics has been disastrous for the discipline, because in large part all research has pretty much been bunk, devoid of value to anyone but other accountics researchers. Prior to the advent of accountics, The Accounting Review regularly contained think pieces. After accountics, no think pieces were judged to have any value what-so-ever. Of course, not all think pieces, if they were to be written, contain scholarship However, the ancient history of academic accouting is that such pieces sometimes contained scholarship of the highest level.
A final reason deals with the conservative nature of most accounting professors. Accounting professors have been described as the most traditional and conservative group of faculty in the entire academy. Such professors are naturally resistant to change. This resistance to change is regularly seen by the continued use of archaic instructional approaches that have been debunked by the learning centered approach. Never-the-less, almost all accounting professors continue to use the old ways of teaching.
I think that the acadeic discipline of accounting could be amazingly transformed if more accounting professors started blogging. Medicine has its list of top 50 blogs, and Law has its top 100. Accounting only has ten blogs in total.
Over and out – - David Albrecht
Hi David, thanks for the link. I think the reasons you give for why accountancy profs don’t blog are good. One of the areas I am interested in is getting these new forms of output recognised as scholarship – this is probably easier in my domain (educational technology) than accountancy. An additional factor which you mention is the control the professional bodies place – they want to determine (and therefore sell) recognition of professional development. Blogging (and other bottom-up approaches) are a direct threat to this centralised, top-down monopoly. Therefore there is little encouragement professionally to engage in them.
Martin,
Thanks for checking out my essay. Yes, getting blogging contributions recognized in your field is undoubtedly an easier road than in mine. I appreciate the work you have done. Best of luck to you.
Dr. Albrecht,
I am glad that you have chosen to blog. I came upon your blog in search of material for a paper on the costs and benefits of IFRS adoption in the US for an out-of-class research project on the topic. Your content provides a very detailed and well-reasoned argument against IFRS adoption. Interestingly, despite the SEC’s plan to adopt the standard, few in the majority seem to have much more of an argument for IFRS other than that it would eliminate the need to keep two sets of books. The “loud minority” of IFRS critics, as the author from The Accounting Onion describes it, seems to have thought this situation through much more thoroughly.
I just wish that more scholarly publications would pick up on dissenting views regarding IFRS convergence. From what I’ve found in my research so far, there are a few articles in the CPA Journal and the Journal of Accountancy but not much. Most of what I’ve found has come from trade publications (like Compliance Week and CFO) and from blogs from scholars, like you. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to use content from your and other blogs in my paper since the source, a WordPress blog, could hardly be considered scholarly even though it is written and published by a very knowledgeable professor. I’d like to present a paper to a conference or some kind of scholarly publication, where a blog simply won’t suffice as source material. So, I’m stuck using white papers from the Big 4 and the SEC (clearly heavily biased sources) and from the few scholarly and trade publications that exist that cover the topic. There’s not much I think that I can do about that; it’s just the way it is.
Anyway, thanks for providing a site with great content and constant updates. I look forward to reading the pro-IFRS arguments on your blog so that I can get a better feel for their side of things.
Cody Meglio
Accounting, Finance, and Economics triple-major, class of 2011
Marietta College
Dr. Albrecht,
The reason I’ve been reluctant to cite content from blogs, at least in the past, is that nearly every professor that I’ve had to write a paper for at both the community college and four-year college level have more or less condemned blogs and other sources, like Wikipedia. According to one professor, anyone can publish content in either venue/format and there is no way to verify the quality or source of the material, especially on a free blogging service like WordPress or Blogspot. I think that this decree stands mostly because the students in the past must have cited random and ill-maintained blogs by some John Doe who knew nothing about the topic at hand.
Many times, I have found quality content on blogs featured on the websites of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal that I didn’t feel I could use simply because the source was a blog.
Since this blog, and others, like the Accounting Onion and the blog maintained by the AICPA @ ifrs.com, are so well-written and high quality, perhaps I should speak with my professor about using this as a source. I just know that, in the past, the use of blogs has been disallowed for the reasons above.
Cody Meglio
Cody,
The stuff that I write about in the Summa, and what Tom Selling writes about in the Onion, has no other outlet. One advantage of blogging by professors is that they are able to write about the most current issues. I am simply unable to get my stuff into refereed journals because I write about extremely current events, and by the time they can go through a review process (6-24 months), the topic is hopelessly dated. Some of my essays have been read by 1,000+, which is much more than a refereed article in an academic journal ever gets read. For example, I’ve had two articles in refereed journals (an income smoothing piece in JBFA and an education piece in The Journal on Excellence in College Teaching) that were well written enough to be accepted immediately without revision, but languished for at least 24 months before appearing in print. Can you imagine my waiting 24 months before my comments on IFRS were to appear in print? No one would care by the time the journal came out.
As a signal of quality, one only need look at the number of citations. I maintain a page of citations to essays in The Summa, respected journals like CFO and NYT, and some highly respected blogs. When I get quoted in papers like WSJ, NYT, LATimes, it is a matter of currency. No one cares about yesterday’s news.
The essays I write are as scholarly as anything in a refereed scholarly journal.
You refer to Wikipedia. The use of Wikipedia is somewhat controversial, but those that don’t allow their students to use Wikipedia tend to have an arbitrary nature. I don’t know about you, but Wikipedia is the first online resource I turn to when trying to research something. Of course I keep digging in other resources until I can confirm or disconfirm what is written in Wikipedia, but I can recall only one time out of hundreds in which I was disappointed with false material.
If you find my blog to be useful, I hope you encourage your fellow students to visit it. Although no every student will find all my essays useful, most accounting students will occasionally find at least one of my blogs to be interesting.
Dave Albrecht
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