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Jumping on the wrong bus: Reflections on a long, strange journey

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  • Williams, Paul F.

Abstract

This essay is a reflection on my academic career. The strangeness of my career journey is due to the coincidence of my birth: I was born into and grew up in a United States when the New Deal consensus was the prevailing framer of social, political and economic debates, but entered my Ph.D. studies in accounting at the moment that New Deal consensus was being quite forcibly replaced by one shaped by anti – New Deal intellectuals. The resulting Neoliberal revolution has profoundly reshaped American society and is proceeding to reshape others globally. The effect of neoliberalism in Western democracies has been the reshaping of political decision making via colonizing every aspect of economic, social and political life with the framing of market logic. Neoliberalism also profoundly changed the academic discipline of accounting from the one I believed I was entering (the wrong bus I got onto) into one that made me an outsider for my entire academic career. My work has been focused on various aspects of the bad consequences for accounting of that radical change. One of those consequences has been to remove imagination and intellectual playfulness (what little there was) to replace it with a stultifying, dogmatic, methodologically driven system designed mainly to produce politically correct academic reputations. Another consequence has been the stripping of what is essentially a moral discourse (it’s accountability, stupid) of any ethical content in order to create an economically technical discourse (e.g., predicting cash flows) without any proven technical capabilities.

Suggested Citation

  • Williams, Paul F., 2017. "Jumping on the wrong bus: Reflections on a long, strange journey," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 76-85.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:crpeac:v:49:y:2017:i:c:p:76-85
    DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2017.10.004
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Ravenscroft, Sue & Williams, Paul F., 2021. "Sustaining discreditable accounting research through ignorance: The mainstream elite’s response to the 2008 financial crisis," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).

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