Grounded theory: a theory discovery method for accounting research

Social scientists have been recognising the shortcomings of the scientific methodology for quite some time. The main shortcoming, according to them, has been the oversimplified deductive approach to theory development that has been adopted in the scientific methods. The oversimplification occurs because some of the essential variables of reality are assumed to be constants. In a similar vein, reseachers in social science have often been making calls for the adoption of the naturalistic approach to study complex human penomena. We believe the construction of accounting phenomena belongs to this category, and suggest the use of the naturalistic approach to examine them as they may not be examinable by the structured theory driven scientific approach. Within the naturalistic domain, we propose the use of a method of research called the Grounded Theory method. The rationale behind the Grounded Theory method is that theory should be grounded in empirical evidence, i.e. evolve from data, rather than be developed a priori and then be tested. Since its introduction in the 1960s, the grounded theory method has found favour in many other disciplines, such as nursing, sociology and organisation studies. This chapter suggests Grounded Theory method could be a viable alternative available to accounting researchers to examine complex phenomena.