How accounting research studies accountants in popular culture: A methodological reflection on strategies, assumptions, and analytical limits
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5380/rcc.18.102742Keywords:
Popular culture, Professional representations, Interpretivist methodology, Accounting researchAbstract
This article examines, from a methodological perspective, how accounting scholarship has investigated representations of accountants in popular culture. Previous studies show that literary works, films, television series, and humorous artefacts participate in the symbolic construction of professional identity. The methodological dimension of these studies, however, remains underexplored. Based on an interpretivist review of 39 peer-reviewed articles published between 1958 and 2025, the study analyses the methodological strategies that structure this subfield of the literature. The analysis shows the predominance of interpretivist qualitative strategies, such as content analysis, discourse analysis, historical research, and film analysis, as well as recurring choices regarding empirical sources, historical periods, and privileged cultural contexts. It argues that these choices express relatively stable analytical assumptions about the nature of popular culture, the process of representation, and the accounting profession, which are often mobilised implicitly. By making these methodological conventions explicit, the article shows how the stabilisation of particular research strategies guides empirical analyses, favours certain images of accountants, and delimits the interpretive scope of accounting research on popular culture.
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