This article presents information on a study that provided insights into the organizational set prestige ranking. In this article, the authors examined the ramifications of an organizational set prestige ranking. It was found that 86% of the top twenty accounting department faculty members obtained their doctoral degrees from top twenty departments and that only slightly less than 4% of the Ph.D. graduates of non top twenty departments presently occupy faculty positions in the top twenty. When comparing the top five departments to the remaining top twenty departments, it was found that the top five hire their own graduates more frequently and employ on their faculties a greater proportion of other top five doctoral graduates than do the remaining members of the top twenty. These findings were found to be remarkably similar to those of scholar George R. Gross' earlier study of sociology departments. It will be interesting to observe whether any changes in these hiring practices will occur as a result of the continually increasing imbalance in the supply of and demand for accounting doctoral graduates.

This article presents a study conducted to compare published accounting research and qualities of accounting faculty and doctoral programs. Recently, two studies have been published in which accounting departments were ranked according to some perceived criterion of excellence. Neither of these studies described the criterion of excellence to be utilized in the development of the rankings; rather they allowed the respondents to use their own subjective criteria. Objective criteria would be preferable as a basis for assessing the quality of the various accounting departments. One such criterion is the amount of research which is attributable to each department, and an indicator of research output is the number of articles published in the accounting journals. The results of this study are subject to several limitations. The study only analyzed the research which has been published in four accounting journals, one of which is published by the University of Chicago. No attempt was made to evaluate the effect of differences in the sizes of accounting faculties or doctoral programs.