Matters of concern and engaged research

This paper argues that repeated concerns about the nature of academic accounting research should be taken seriously. It proposes engaged research as a means of deepening our social license. Anchored in the argument of Chua and Fiedler (2022), engaged research is characterised as follows. It engages with complex relations of practice, is a crosscultural journey and it co‐produces research on matters that matter (to practitioners, regulators, academics, communities). The paper outlines how accounting research could engage with a contemporary business landscape characterised by pervasive digitisation as well as new risks and opportunities brought about by climate change.