PhD Program 40th Anniversary Alumni Profile: Meet Vaughan Radcliffe, '95

As part of our ongoing celebration of the Alberta School of Business PhD program’s 40th anniversary, we speak with Vaughan Radcliffe, PhD ’95, about how his research has shaped the field of accounting — and where it’s headed next. Thirty years after earning his PhD, Radcliffe is a professor at the Ivey Business School at Western University, where he has spent 22 years exploring governance, public policy, and the evolving role of professional expertise.

He has published widely in top academic journals, held a faculty position at Case Western Reserve University, and explored topics ranging from the politicization of audit reports to the craftsmanship of tax advisory work — one of the few areas of accounting that has resisted AI-driven automation. 

In this Q&A, he reflects on the curiosity-driven approach he developed during his PhD, the lasting impact of his fieldwork with the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta, and why standing out in research means daring to be original.

Tell us about your current role and current area of research.

I have several papers ongoing presently. One paper is conditionally accepted at The Accounting Review and concerns Tax, Technology and Craftsmanship. It studies the role of tax advisors and the role of technology in their professional practice. Essentially, unlike auditing, which recent research suggests has been heavily colonised by AI tools, tax advisory work has proved resistant to such technology, with advisers putting a great deal of faith in the judgment and subjectivity of advisers who develop expertise, often over decades of experience. They form bespoke tax solutions to complex tax problems, being mindful of case facts. We termed this craftsmanship, after Richard Sennett’s work in this area on the role of craftsmanship and expertise in high performance environments. Reviewers were very positive about this piece.

A second piece we have ongoing is a linguistic analysis of reports published by the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario. We scanned reports going back forty years and fed them into linguistic analysis software. The results tended to support the hypothesis that the language used had become more politicised over time, especially after the introduction of value for money auditing mandates. This paper is under review.

How has the Alberta School of Business PhD program influenced your approach to accounting research?

I think the Alberta PhD program taught me to follow my sense of curiosity about the world. My PhD was on value for money auditing and came in two halves: the first half was a history of value for money auditing, the second was fieldwork in which I followed members of the Office of the Auditor General of Alberta as they went about efficiency auditing. At the time no one was doing research in these areas. I went ahead anyway. The two FT 50 journal articles that came out of my PhD are still the most cited pieces I have published, and I have a range of well cited material. But following a sense of curiosity turned out to be an inspired choice. I have followed these instincts throughout my career, looking for new areas for inquiry.

Can you describe a moment or project during your PhD that had a lasting impact on you?

I think standing outside the Office of the Auditor General on the first day of fieldwork had a lasting impact. I remember looking up at their impressive office building and thinking to myself, I had better find something here, or I’ll never graduate. In fact their work turned out to be fascinating and of real value to society, and I tried to explain that in my research. They saw themselves as encouraging change.

What’s the most unusual or surprising place your research has taken you?

The Ohio State Archives has been the scene of a lot of recent research. I based a paper on the State Auditor’s enumeration of people with disabilities over the course of more than a century on records kept in the State Archives. The Township Assessors, County Auditors, all the way up to the Auditor of State were involved in a house to house canvass of the disabled population of the State that was carried out at regular intervals. There are ethical questions about whether the accounting profession should use its expertise to further projects like that, especially since enumeration could be a prelude to institutionalisation. We published that research in the Journal of Business Ethics. I remember thinking when I clicked the button to submit that piece, they’ll either love it or hate it. Well, they loved it.

What advice would you give to current or prospective PhD students?

Try to do original work. The worst thing you can do is follow the crowd and copy what everyone else is doing. Look for new settings, new research questions, new applications of ideas. If you do that you are less likely to come up against the hardest negative review comments of all, those that question the extent of your contribution. Being original is the best response to the contribution issue.