| Abstract: | Prestige distinctions are critical to any understanding of the US academic community. Past rankings of academic departments of accounting, based on a variety of factors including faculty publications, citations and external perceptions, fail to provide a means of assessing relative prestige. This paper proposes that an accounting department's ability to place its doctoral recipients should serve as the pivotal prestige measurement. As such, prestige becomes an ex anteattribute of the stratification system rather than an ex postproductivity metric. An empirical analysis of accounting faculty placements from graduate schools in the US was conducted as a means of ranking US departments of accounting that offer the doctoral degree. The resultant rankings, also evaluated over time and against programme size, provide a unique opportunity to observe a hierarchy of social judgment. |
