Anthony Hopwood, the founder of Accounting, Organizations and Society, argued that the legitimacy and relevance of knowledge produced by the broad range of ever-evolving quantitative methods could be enhanced by an improved understanding of practitioners' work realities as experienced in the field. Indeed, in recent years, a number of academic journals that have been traditionally committed to the application of formal quantitative research methods to accounting and auditing questions have devoted more publication space to qualitative research, including field work.1 Behavioral audit researchers have also urged their research community to be receptive to forms of qualitative inquiry (e.g., Carcello, Hermanson, and Ye 2011, 18–19). In the words of Gibbins and Jamal (1993, 452):
Numerous qualitative research methods are known to be particularly effective at generating this type of grounded understanding of practice (Bansal and Corley 2011; Hopwood 1983). Such insight is beneficial for its...
