When Contribution Matters

The aim of the Essex Accounting Centre (EAC) research seminar series is to support our world-class research activities in five key areas: accounting and global development; capital Markets, audit, regulation & reporting; publicness and resilience, precarity, exclusion & social justice; and environment, climate change & vulnerability. The seminar series is also expected to promote inter-disciplinary research that links the work of members of the centre with others both within the university and with external institutions.

This serves as a starting point for reflection on the current state of legitimacy of scientific institutions in general and, in particular, the traditional way of building knowledge through our publications in indexed academic journals.

In this space, Professor Javier Husillos would like to discuss whether social science research in general, and accounting research in particular, is truly useful in solving the major social and environmental problems of our time. To do this, Javier will use the concept of ‘contribution’ as a guiding thread, which is the basis of all research, and will trace it throughout the classic structure of a scientific publication (a paper), from the introduction to the conclusions. The presentation can be adapted to any level, but he believes it will be particularly useful for PhD students and critical scholars.

Questions such as the following could be addressed:

• Is academic contribution the same as social contribution?
• Can an article be published in a high-impact journal and never have any impact on the resolution of a social, economic, or environmental problem? Why?
• Does this have anything to do with the loss of legitimacy of science and our profession (along with the questioning of the concept of “progress,” numerous social norms and institutions such as democracy itself, the family model, or the concept of religion, in the face of the emergence of far-reaching technological innovations such as artificial intelligence and all its derivatives, in a context flooded with information)?