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Academic freedom is often equated with protection from political and economic interference. Authoritative definitions are broader. They combine protection from external interference, peer-based evaluation, and institutional arrangements for scholarly self-governance. Drawing on Honneth’s (2014) theory of democratic institutions, this paper develops the second and third elements and integrates all three within a recognition-theoretical framework that reconceptualizes academic freedom as social freedom. Using accounting as a case, we reconstruct two transformations that shape the discipline today: the theory revolution of the 1960s, which consolidated peer-based epistemic recognition, and the journal ranking revolution of the 1990s, which reorganized recognition around performance metrics and publication hierarchies. We show that academic freedom can be hollowed out from within without being formally revoked and argue that a discipline weakened from within is less able to resist external threats. Defending academic freedom requires attention to architectures of recognition through which scholarly worth and truth are organized.

This field study investigates an empirical setting where the introduction of new formal results controls—stretch targets for productivity that are seemingly unachievable with current process efficiencies—is associated with high productivity gains over extended periods of time. Contrary to findings from the prior management accounting research, employees meet the targets by being creative and risk-taking in continuously innovating processes, despite the pressure induced by high target-level difficulty. Mobilizing self-determination theory, we argue that a specific interrelation of personnel and cultural control with results control supports internalization of the latter by employees. In this situation, employees perceive the high performance required by the results control assimilated into their own values, which facilitates the autonomous motivation necessary for their creativity. Our findings contribute to the literature by identifying the conditions, and discovering the mechanisms, that enhance the efficacy of stretch targets.