ABSTRACT
Drawing on Jan Reed’s (2007) book, Appreciative Inquiry: Research for Change, this chapter provides a detailed description of appreciative inquiry (hereafter AI) and its potential usefulness to accounting research. AI is well known to organisational development (OD) researchers and practitioners as a research methodology to investigate organisational change. An AI approach has the potential to construct useful knowledge that may not normally be gained through focusing only on ‘negative’ aspects of accounting and organisational processes. The essential message of AI methodology is that it is useful to attend to what works well in a particular setting. This different mode of engagement can help to produce alternative (positive) interpretations of an organisational phenomenon. Throughout an AI study (from investigation to dissemination phases), a researcher can engage with different audiences (practitioners, policymakers and researchers) to construct a story or a range of stories of people helping to make ‘things work better’ (Reed, 2007, p. 176). This chapter presents a review of cases and articles from OD and change literature. More specifically, it borrows ideas from Reed (2007) and others (for example, Cooperrider and Avital, 2004; Cooperrider and McQuaid, 2012; Cooperrider, Whitney and Stavros, 2003; and Drew and Wallis, 2014) to explore how AI can be used in accounting research to understand accounting and control practices from a different perspective.
