Complexity at the interface: Understanding the practical relevance of being interdisciplinary in public sector accounting research

Given the complexity associated with concepts like hybrid and collaborative governance in public service delivery, public management and accounting research as a disciplinary endeavor is challenged by scholarly calls for... [ view full abstract ]

Given the complexity associated with concepts like hybrid and collaborative governance in public service delivery, public management and accounting research as a disciplinary endeavor is challenged by scholarly calls for thinking more interdisciplinary: as a research community, within the ‘schools of thought’ used across the field and also when starting an individual research inquiry. The main proposition for this reasoning refers to the need to create theoretical insights that better ‘fit’ the intricacy of hybrid and collaborative accounting practices, in particular by increasing the scope of perspectives and methods used for such theory development. The debate around the suitability of theoretical pluralism interrelates with the objective that public sector accounting theories should be capable of providing valid support for decision-making in public service delivery, hence the stakeholder who is interested in how to practice accounting, e.g. managers, controllers, street-level bureaucrats and the organizations by themselves. Perhaps not only the debate around the potential of interdisciplinarity, but also the heterogeneity of theoretical insights probably associated with being interdisciplinary in the production of public sector accounting knowledge challenge the quest for increasing its practical relevance. Despite further assessing why interdisciplinarity is a scientifically useful effort, there is also a necessity to assess what the implications of ‘thinking (more) interdisciplinary’ are for the extent practitioners may value and use conceptual and instrumental proposals that derive from the public sector accounting research community.

The paper aims to have a closer look at the ‘implications for practice’ usually concerned with study-level outcomes and how they are typically constructed when empirical interdisciplinary research is published in Public Administration and Accounting journals. The analysis builds on cases of ‘interdisciplinary-based’ proposals for practice that exhibit why research outcomes are expected to have some practical value and relevance. Theoretically, the construct of ‘practical utility’ refers to the analytical unit to explore issues and areas of practical reasoning which are constituted as a distinctive domain of theorizing, certainly in addition and in contrast to the ‘scientific utility’ of a particular research inquiry that aims to deliver an interdisciplinary-based theoretical contribution.

The study refers to the construction of ‘Implications for Practice’ of interdisciplinary-based public sector accounting research. It aims to gather and analyse proposals that suggest the practical value of such research published in a setting of Public Administration and Accounting journals (so far: Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, Public Money & Management). The sample consists of empirical studies published in these journals during 2010-2014.

The outcome state of the paper is tentative. The aim is to identify how the interdisciplinary public sector accounting community constitutes the conceptual and instrumental relevance of its research outcomes, perhaps in terms of rhetorical strategies used to translate rigor research into practical recommendations. These insights might be useful to further substantiate the appropriate role(s) for ‘Implication of Practice’ at the study-level and, hence, the practice-oriented utility as a focus of theorizing in an interdisciplinary-based public sector accounting research domain.