Research With(out) Outputs: Experimenting Toward Interpretive Accounting Research

In a neoliberal university context there are increasing pressures to define the value of research in relation to “output”, often taken to mean the publication of papers in top-tier academic journals. This paper contributes toward an understanding of these pressures and their effects by reporting and reflecting on the experiences of attendees at a series of eight experimental workshops designed to produce “research without output”. Drawing on the social studies of science literature, we make sense of and analyze the workshops and the participants’ experiences, as a socio-material assemblage composed of ideational, material and human elements. Our analysis offers two contributions. Firstly, we show how in assembling a method to produce research without output, pressures such a career concerns and publication requirements that we sought to make absent, continually remerged as counter-dynamics that constrained the way we read, theorized and reasoned. Secondly, we suggest various ways that this unavoidable entanglement between aspirations to define research without output and their counter-dynamics provides insights into the future of interdisciplinary research. Most centrally, we find that in striving toward research activities without output we can construct spaces that allow researchers to engage in research and even produce output in ways that would not otherwise be expected and valued. As interdisciplinary scholars, we suggest that striving toward research without output may be more valuable than ever, even if doing so is full of contradictions, as described in this paper.