Workshop as Method: A Technology of Humility for Interpretive and Critical Accounting Research

Changes in the university context are increasing pressures to define the value of research in terms of “output”, meaning the publication of papers in highly ranked academic journals. This paper contributes toward an understanding of these pressures and their effects on knowledge production 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 analyse the workshops and the participants' experiences, in terms of the workshops as research methods and those methods as technologies of humility. The findings demonstrate 1) how the appeal to research as output affects the way we are encouraged to read, theorise, and reason, 2) why this appeal is difficult to resist, and 3) the specific possibilities to arrange knowledge production and value research differently when we spend more time on re-evaluating (problematising) our own fields of research with humility and curiosity. The paper suggests a different mode of knowledge production in interdisciplinary accounting research generated by workshops that are built around curiosity rather than outputs. Two focal points of technologies of humility are explored: vulnerability and distribution, both of which this paper argues contribute to alternativity. Vulnerability points to a need to raise doubts and debates on the relationship between borrowing interdisciplinary theories and theorisation in accounting research without necessarily putting them to closure. Distribution refers to the redistribution of vulnerable knowledge to emerging scholars in constructive ways so as to give visibility to alternative and plural viewpoints as a basis for more nuanced interrogation of knowledge production. Both properties contribute to alternativity, which refers to the many possibilities of constructing knowledge and to the role of senior researchers and renowned institutions in framing the unsettled debates.