Chapter 3: “Inbreeding” Accounting Faculty in the USA: A Longitudinal Analysis

Academic accounting has grown accustomed to a difficult faculty labor situation. Getting adequate staffing has been challenged by the insufficient number of terminally qualified individuals joining its ranks in recent decades. One readily available strategy has been to hire one’s own graduates even if this violates the informal norm against what could be called inbreeding. This strategy offers the advantage of mitigating the uncertainties and cost of a tenure track commitment to a less well-known external candidate. At the same time, the displacement of tenure track faculty with non-tenure track faculty provides another opportunity for programs to avoid the market by hiring their own graduates. This chapter studies the historical emergence of inbreeding as a labor strategy for academic accounting. Examining the faculty at all USA schools producing doctoral degrees in the discipline in 2000, 2010, and 2020, this chapter finds an increase in delayed inbreeding on the tenure track, and even larger increases in inbreeding off the tenure track. The impact of inbreeding on accounting faculty gender diversity is also studied.