Interdisciplinary accounting research adopts a broad understanding of accounting as calculative practices that can appear in many forms and contexts. Accounting practices are found, of course, in the areas of financial reporting, auditing, and cost accounting. But calculative practices originating from accounting have also become ubiquitous in modern societies, e.g., in the form of rankings, quality indicators, population statistics. In the Research Centre, we are studying preconditions and effects of various calculative practices in business, not-for-profit organisations, and wider Society from a multitude of perspectives and research approaches from economics, management, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Exemplary research projects deal with reporting regulation, auditing and sustainability forecasts in planning and budgeting, the roles of management accountants, quality indicators, risk maps, costing concepts in social media discourses, or the publish-or-perish culture in universities.

Vision

The Research Center provides the institutional and intellectual foundation for original and innovative interdisciplinary research on accounting practices. So far, it has enabled us to sustainably position the University of Innsbruck as the centre of interdisciplinary accounting research in the German-speaking countries. We have twice hosted the most established international conference in the field, researchers from the Research Center act as editors or associate editors of top research journals in our field, and our PhD graduates are employed at highly reputed schools and universities. The newly hired professors in the fields of financial accounting and auditing have expanded our research portfolio and will contribute to further developing our network.

EPoS is the institutional manifestation of our vision of inter- and transdisciplinary research in the social sciences. EPoS provides the arena for intellectual exchange of researchers from the different fields of social sciences at the University of Innsbruck. This will enrich our own understandings, and, under fortunate circumstances, it will lead to new ideas, cooperation, or projects. But EPoS is also the ‘great enabler’ for early career researchers and PhD students through its multitude of initiatives and formats as well as financial support.