This paper analyses all articles published in Accounting History using a topic modeling technique. Previous studies focus on the content of accounting history, but not how the field has evolved. The paper complements prior assessments of the research published in Accounting History by providing measures of the relative prevalence of research areas and their evolution over time. The analysis offers insights into accounting history by refining previous categorisations, uncovering overlooked topic areas, and substantiating trends, such as the demise of interest in the technical core of accounting in favour of more variegated and fragmented approaches. The findings are discussed in light of the claimed pluralisation of methodological and theoretical approaches in this field
The article aims to explore ways of theorizing in accounting history research. The article draws on findings originating from a semi-automated text analysis by means of topic modelling of 1,300 accounting history papers published between 1996 and 2015 across six journals most relevant to the discipline. Findings show the presence of a whole range of ways of theorizing at different levels of abstraction (from narrating to conceptualizing to theorizing settings to grand theorizing). Different ways of theorizing tend to be associated not only with specific research objects but also with specific journal types. Overall, both narrating and grand theorizing are relatively decreasing in favour of mid-range theorizing approaches, which seem to be on the rise.
Which cultural intermediaries are involved in the search for, and selection of, aspiring authors in the Italian book publishing industry? What do they do and why? I provide an in-depth description of cultural intermediaries involved in book production, based on a study of the Italian literary field, which has been characterised in recent years by an intense search for successful books by first-time authors. I find that two types of intermediaries are involved in the book preselection process: casual intermediaries who occasionally build on their position within the field to broker manuscripts between aspiring authors and publishers, and serial intermediaries who choose repeatedly to act as gatekeepers. Both types of intermediaries are rewarded with social capital, whereas serial intermediaries earn symbolic capital as well. Publishers rely on the same intermediaries for the selection of both literary and popular fiction. Cooperation among agents in the field is more common than expected.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced lockdowns in several countries, and many organisations had to introduce teleworking for their employees. While remote working is not a new thing, and was already permitted by laws, the extent to which enterprises had to redefine their process is unprecedented. Therefore, teleworking was widely discussed in national media. Newspapers are a relevant outlet for the diffusion and legitimation of schemata of interpretation, and we explored of teleworking was framed in the Italian discursive space during the first two months of the pandemic. We analysed seven national newspapers, and adopted a semi-automatic text analysis, which we performed through topic modelling. In this paper, we describe the topics that are used by newspapers to frame teleworking, the different use of these topics performed by different newspapers, the trend of topics over time, and we discuss the institutionalisation of the issue of teleworking.
Texts are among the most relevant data sources for social scientists, and traditionally researchers adopt qualitative methods for dealing with them. Yet, new computer aided techniques offer promising methodological avenues for scholars, which can now deal with big corpora of texts. One of the techniques that recently gained more relevance is Topic Modelling, which permits extracting bag of words which co-occur often in texts. While Topic Modelling was fruitfully used in sociology and management, existing software for performing it requires coding skills, and are not user friendly. In this paper we present MITAO, a new graphic-based, user friendly, open source software for performing topic modelling and other analysis on textual data.
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