On Physics envy in Accounting.

In the natural sciences, stripped of the details, most profound ideas can be explained to any one with a high school education. The objective of the  details in such sciences is to ensure the integrity of the statements, and the objective of the experimentation is to ensure the validity of the statements.

I can give two examples:

1.

The great American sociologist George Homans, a long ago, did profound work on  motivation and cohesion in human groups. You do not see a single mathematical symbol in most of his works. Yet the beauty of his generalisations is stunning. Herb Simon, in one of the articles in "Models of Man", derived the same generalisations by studying the stability of a dynamical system described by a system of   differential equations. The lack of mathematics in Homan's own work does not  make his contributions any less profound, and Simon's mathematicising of it  does not add much to what we already knew from Homans.  However, Simon's 

work enables us to rely on the veracity of Homan's conclusions without having to  depend on Homan's credibility as a social scientist.

2.

Arguably one of the greatest biologists of the 20th century, JBS Haldane wrote a very simple but profound book titled "On Being the Right Size", meant to be read by union workers in England with little education (nowadays many college students  probably would have as much problems appreciating it as the then union workers would have had with today's popular music). One sentence says it all (he is trying to describe that  size of an animal usually determines the anatomy):   "Insects, being so small,  do not have oxygen-carrying bloodstreams. What little oxygen their cells require  can be absorbed by simple diffusion of air through their bodies. But being larger 

means an animal must take on complicated oxygen pumping and distributing  systems to reach all the cells."

A modern systems biologist would explain the same with a mathematical model.

In accountics, it is not sure to me what the objectives are, but I suspect they are not the same as in the natural sciences. I think the main problem with accountics research is the pervasiveness of Physics envy. Giving the appearance of being a "science" is more important than  having the scientific spirit. That being the case, use of quantitative methods in general has assumed a theological orientation.

As I see it, the veracity of most accountics generalisations depend almost entirely on the credibility of the authors, and the "system" rather than the mathematisation or experimentation provides it. Since the assertions are rarely, if ever, questioned (the only questioning is by the referee gatekeepers with vested interest in perpetuating

their version of the "truth"), the whole enterprise  resembles a religion more than it does a "science".

The credibility of the entire accounting academia is at stake. We are to the accounting profession what Physicists are to engineering. Just as engineers not paying heed to physicists would indicate lack of relevance (and possibly coherence) of Physics, the accounting profession not paying heed to what ever it is we do is symptomatic of the lack of relevance (and possibly coherence) of what we research. It does no one service for us to pretend that what ever it is that we do is more profound than the rest of the world (particularly the profession) is willing to admit. It only signals our autistic tendencies.