The winnowing away of behavioral accounting research in the US: The process for anointing academic elites

This paper reports the results of a study of the most prolific publishers in the four recognized most prestigious journals in accounting for the period 1963 through 1999. The focus is on learning whether the widespread perception that behavioral accounting research (BAR) has diminished in significance as a prominent paradigm in the US accounting academy has any validity and to identify whether a new generation of US BAR researchers is emerging to join the academic elite. Based on the characteristics of persons who have appeared as authors five or more times during the study period, it seems that BAR is in recession in shaping the US academic agenda in accounting. The power of successful individuals to shape the academic agenda as evidenced by service on editorial boards of prominent journals is dominated by those individuals who are graduates of a set of elite schools utilizing a neoclassical economics based research paradigm. The power of this group seems to be growing in the US. In spite of the interest in BAR among accounting doctoral students and faculty, it is not a pursuit that now leads to academic status, which, in turn, diminishes its potential contribution towards the shaping of the accounting academic agenda. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.