AAA Spark Meeting of the Regions

“Inbreeding” Accounting Faculty in the U.S.: A Longitudinal Analysis

• In Event: Topics on Academia

Abstract

Academic accounting, as a discipline, has grown accustomed to a difficult faculty labor situation. Getting adequate staffing has been challenged by the insufficient number of terminally qualified individuals joining its ranks in recent decades and by the variability in student demand for training in the subject. One readily available strategy would be to hire one’s own graduates even if this violates the informal norm against what could be called inbreeding. This strategy includes the advantage of mitigating the uncertainties and cost of a tenure track commitment to and less well-known external candidate and the displacement of tenure track faculty with non- tenure track faculty whose lesser required qualifications make them more readily available to every school from their other academic programs. This paper studies the historical emergence of inbreeding as a labor strategy for academic accounting. Examining the faculty at all US schools engaged in the production of doctoral degrees in the discipline in 2000, 2010 and 2020, this paper finds an increase in subsequent inbreeding on the tenure track, and even larger increases off the tenure track. Inbreeding has also served as a major mechanism for the feminization of the accounting professoriate at doctoral programs in the US.

Authors

• Timothy J. Fogarty, Case Western Reserve University

• Mary Sasmaz, Case Western Reserve University