Commentary: Rick Antle On Intellectual Boundaries In Accoun

It is often necessary to impose intellectual boundaries in performing scholarly activities, but such boundaries are too often dysfunctional. Accounting institutions raise a vast array of questions and issues that have psychological, sociological, economic, and political dimensions. Unfortunately, the intellectual bounds that are imposed in trying to carve out a tractable piece of an accounting problem can blind scholars to alternate approaches to the problem and inhibit the process of scientific understanding. By examining one accounting topic - earnings management - it can be shown that different approaches can uncover different aspects of the problem. One research methodology - agency theory - provides a logical structure for discovering basic relationships and can be applied to a variety of accounting issues. To be productive, intellectual boundaries must be fluid, ever changing, and ever increasing.