Editorial
Article Type: Literature and insights From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 29, Issue 5.
Do Not Disrupt?
What do you think when you hear a politician use the phrase “going forward?” It might be employed in an expression like, “We expect to see great benefits from this policy in budget measures going forward”. Since they always use it when they are referring to the future, it is not just ugly but also redundant. If you are like me, you flinch at the laziness.
We all know what a buzzword is once it is entrenched, and many of us have a sense of when a word or phrase gains currency,beginning to sound more like rhetoric than substance. Such things fail to carry weight any more; they become empty. With that in mind, I want to focus on a word that has crept into common use but in a particular way – it is “disruptive”.
When people in academia began describing events or processes as “disruptive”, I initially took it as a simple statement about change. Dictionaries posit synonyms such as unruly, troublesome, and unsettling and I took these people’s references to mean that the previous order of things was being challenged, perhaps disturbed in some important way. It is not a bad idea to question how one teaches, for instance, or to evaluate the nature of assessment that is best suited to learning in a particular discipline,especially if it results in changes to produce better outcomes. Those aspects of life in universities are worth constant review and an occasional overhaul, and the same principle applies to business practices.
What was often meant by “disruption” in recent times, however – at least among bureaucrats, academics in computing and engineering(to name but two fields), technicians, and others with innovation in particular on their minds – was the application of technology in education. I shivered at the audacity of such an assumption. Why the appropriation of the term in this way? Why just computers and the use of the internet, even if their use was envisaged in relation to teaching? And why would that automatically be innovative let alone beneficial? Where were the broader, more human considerations?
The term has been around for years in engineering, computing and behavioural science. Dramatic advances in fuel efficiency or reduction of pollution through re-engineering, for instance, might qualify as disruptive whether or not they were labelled as such when introduced. Even so, use of the word risks becoming hackneyed.
I chanced upon an advertisement in a 2014 automotive magazine recently that placed a stylised image of Oakley sunglasses above one of an F1 Ferrari, both under the legend “Disruptive By Design”. Did they mean that the sunglasses and Ferrari were leading the pack by being different and better? Do not rush off to see which company has been winning F1 championships, by the way. Ferrari’s heyday was a while back (2007 and 2008). And how have sunglasses radically altered?
I have a feeling that “disruption” is being adopted to represent changes as if they are significant, large, beneficial, proven and different, when they actually do not yet display any such characteristics in a notable way. That smacks of marketing puffery,maybe to ennoble bids for research monies and to elevate one’s status. Claims of disruptive practice that are being made in relation to the use of computers in education need to be critically examined. Am I being too cynical – an armchair expert,an ultracrepidarian, a Luddite, a language fetishist – or all of these?
Sydney Grammar School has banned the use of computers in classes. Students may not bring laptops to school and they must handwrite essays and assignments until Year 10. Necessary computer work is performed in the dedicated computer laboratory or at home. The argument is that teaching is a social activity in which promoting conversation helps learning, and the absence of computers removes a distraction. A background claim is that the Australian government’s national initiative to fund schools to buy laptops for students (or, in the case of my own kids’ school, to employ computer technicians and leave the parents to purchase the laptops) was a very expensive exercise that simply made the hardware and software suppliers even wealthier. Like it or not,the move at Sydney Grammar School is what I would call a genuinely “disruptive” change.
We have two contributors of creative material in this issue. First is Yih-Pin Tang with “Accounting for Pollution: Who is Accountable?”, which has as its central concern the question of how education could assist in the fight against the degradation of the environment. Next is Lelys Maddock with “Heat”, a less direct but also imaginative evocation of environmental matters,here presented through a quite different kind of voice.
Your own creative contributions can be submitted via ScholarOne (see below), and your email correspondence is always welcome,of course, at: steve.evans@flinders.edu.au
Acknowledgements
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) welcomes submissions of both research papers and creative writing. Creative writing in the form of poetry and short prose pieces is edited for the Literature and Insights Section only and does not undergo the refereeing procedures required for all research papers published in the main body of AAAJ. Author guidelines for contributions to this section of the journal can be found at: www.emerald grouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=aaaj
Steve Evans - Literary Editor
