Accumulated Advantage in Academic Accounting: More Challenges to the Meritocracy of Scholarship

• In Event: Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum I

Abstract

Inquiries into the structure of academic accounting invariably position the characteristics of faculty members at the center. The literature has convincingly demonstrated that the core of the discipline’s knowledge has been constructed by those employed at a relatively small set of schools and trained at an even smaller number of institutions. This paper seeks to explore the antecedents of this filtering process by showing that those chosen to be doctoral students at elite schools are the product of an earlier process of accumulated advantage. Specifically, this paper analyzes the relationship between the institutional prestige of doctoral, master’s and bachelor’s degree programs of a sample of 928 accounting faculty members who obtained their doctoral degrees in the years 1975 - 2012. Results indicate that those faculty members who attended better master’s and bachelor’s level programs were more likely to attend prestigious doctoral programs. Moreover, the impact of the prestige of the bachelor’s institution was not significantly different from that of the master’s school on the prestige of the doctoral program which the faculty member attended. This leads to the conclusion that accumulated advantage begins with the bachelor’s school and is not substantially overcome at the master’s level. This paper’s findings extend the scope of the accumulated advantage in academic accounting previously documented as beginning with the prestige of the doctoral program.

Authors

• Aleksandra Zimmerman, Case Western Reserve University

• Timothy J Fogarty, Case Western Reserve University