Academic Freedom as Social Freedom: A Normative Reconstruction and Critique of the Accounting Discipline

Abstract

Academic freedom is often equated with protection from political and economic interference. Authoritative definitions are broader. They combine protection from external interference, peer-based evaluation, and institutional arrangements for scholarly self-governance. Drawing on Honneth’s (2014) theory of democratic institutions, this paper develops the second and third elements and integrates all three within a recognition-theoretical framework that reconceptualizes academic freedom as social freedom. Using accounting as a case, we reconstruct two transformations that shape the discipline today: the theory revolution of the 1960s, which consolidated peer-based epistemic recognition, and the journal ranking revolution of the 1990s, which reorganized recognition around performance metrics and publication hierarchies. We show that academic freedom can be hollowed out from within without being formally revoked and argue that a discipline weakened from within is less able to resist external threats. Defending academic freedom requires attention to architectures of recognition through which scholarly worth and truth are organized. JEL Classifications: M41.