Editorial

The international conference on higher education entitled The New Dynamics of Higher Education and Research for Societal Change and Development, held in Paris between July 5-8, 2009, where professors, students, principals, ministers and other actors met to discuss issues around higher education, proposed an implementation of research systems able to promote interdisciplinarityto the participant States, in order to reach the development level necessary to build a comprehensive society of knowledge.¹

Interdisciplinarity has become a challenge that must be answered by education in order to contribute to social development. Thus, it represents a new challenge for institutions, teachers and students; a challenge that was not posed upon education ten years ago during the latter conference, where the challenges on higher education for the years prior to 2009 were defined.

As a recent appearance in the field of higher education, interdisciplinarity tries to persuade every agent intervening in the education process, including students, to select new ways to deal with reality using interaction between disciplines, in order to obtain a global vision on issues and leave behind dogmatic positions based upon a unique facet of social development.

In the case of higher education, an interdisciplinary tuition-learning process develops a visualization of sharper nuances in professional education, if it is taken into account that this new way of conceptualizing and approaching reality allows us to erase frontiers and standardize solid blocks of knowledge built up by diverse disciplines –as long as teachers, students and institutions aim at it– making the comprehension of social phenomena occur from much more flexible perspectives and diverse areas of knowledge.

This process of change requires a transformation of universities into spaces that favor interdisciplinary relations, educators who can facilitate and aid in the construction of such a development, and pupils conscious of the role this kind of education plays in the recognition of the necessary development of special abilities that help to understand and confront reality in an interdisciplinary fashion. In this way, students become a mechanism of control in accordance with their own educational process, as long as they demand the presence of institutions and educators that supply the basic characteristics of an interdisciplinary model.

Nevertheless, this would also imply a previous process on which students would have been able to participate in activities or experiences that could set the path to follow in order to modify the ways they assume their own learning process and on which educators would assume a different role, not allowing their main discipline to set the guidelines for a comprehension of reality, but achieving a holistic approach to social environments using interrelations with other disciplines, other students and other educators.

These features create a complete circle whose characteristics depend on each other's. The student, as a control mechanism, will demand from his tuition and teachers an interdisciplinary education based on knowledge, thoughtfulness, reflection, understanding and proposition rather than on making and forcing. However, in the bestcase scenario, teachers should have been supportive towards the use of learning tools and spaces that develop certain awareness among students about the important role this sort of education plays in the development of Public Accountancy as a profession that deeply impacts society.

Nonetheless, this interrelation cannot exist without a transformation of the approach, style and conception given to the accountancy discipline, of its professionals and the profession itself. A change of paradigm would be the starting point from which the accounting community and the general society would begin to understand accounting as a science, as wells as public accountants and accountancy as a profession, not only from a technical and functionalist, positive perspective but also as agents that foster social development.

Beyond the physical features or curricular structure that the university can display in order to produce professionals in Public Accountancy, such a change of approach can only be real as long as students and educators decide it so. By offering multidisciplinary programs, universities allow their infrastructure to be used in achieving an interdisciplinary professional education. The difference between interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches lies on the trend with which different agents assume professional training, being nothing more than the result of concepts each one has on the discipline and the career.

Thus, the problem is not the seek for specific points on which disciplines might meet to produce a global understanding of reality, due to the complex nature of it and the massive variety of fields from which it can be approached and that need to be understood. The actual problem is meeting educators and students that perceive accounting only as a tool to measure and assert economic benefits without considering its social or environmental repercussions; people who perceive accountancy as a way to develop basic technical abilities in order to receive a feedback payment for the money, time and efforts invested in their tuition, or simply to justify legal demands.

Such as Adela Cortina tells us in her article "The future of Humanities", social problems surpass the action field of any isolated discipline, making it increasingly necessary for projects, investigations and surveys to find support in complementary disciplines. This author finds it fundamental to find "authentic professionals", holding not only a deep technical knowledge but also a general concern on society: not only means, but goals as well.²

Then, achieving interdisciplinarity would imply a reflection from students and professors that redefines paradigms and ideas assumed to be truth throughout their tuition process and during their professional exercise. It would be an epistemological breaking-off that favors the necessary environment to develop thinking.³

If this transformation were not applied, traditional comprehension of accountancy as equal to technique, along with the increasing automation of processes in which a major number of instrumental activities are developed using the minimum human resource, would open a pathway that would likely bring our profession to a standstill.

Magazines as propitiatory elements for interdisciplinary approaches

A fundamental part of the development of interdisciplinary approaches within the accounting community is the production of favoring settlements for it. Our magazine, as well as many others devoted to the same field and other zones of knowledge, has made possible a combination of visions and perspectives that are useful when approaching diverse social and accounting phenomena.

Professionals with different backgrounds and different social contexts meet, holding complementary studies in a variety of knowledge areas, not always being the same areas on which accountancy traditionally focuses, carrying complementary ideas and goals but not always assuming reality from the same perspective.

Magazines such as Cuadernos de Contabilidad allow the accounting community to construct their profession; such a process cannot be exclusive but the complete opposite: it must be open to newer or different ways of thinking in order to constantly enrich and nurture the profession, the discipline and its graduates, reaching a state of evolution that responds to needs within newer and more complex fields.

Paula Andrea Grajales-Sánchez
Editorial Asistant

Pie de página

Grajales-Sánchez, Paula Andrea (2009). Editorial, producciõn intelectual e interdisciplinariedad. Cuadernos de Contabilidad, 10 (27), 205-208.