I sent another article to The Star

I sent another letter to The Star this morning. Let's see whether it will be published or not.

I am a business postgraduate student of a local private university and I intend to do a research on one specific issue of the current employment trend among the accounting profession after reading more than a dozen journal articles and press articles. Many of these articles featured prominent figures, both local and foreign, from the accounting profession calling for a need to understand the current employment trend. One of them even urged research to be done to understand the current employment trend among the young accountants today.

In fact, I have already cited all of these statements and literature in my research proposal. Hence, with great passion, I sent my requests to the major accounting firms to seek permission to distribute questionnaires to their employees. Soon, my passion was broken when an international accounting firm turned down my request citing it is a sensitive issue. Another firm outright told me that they will not entertain such a request. And most of them did not even reply me at all.

I remember sitting in my class and one of my classmates, who is a manager, lamented that there were a lack of research publications in the top-tier journals contributed by our local academic researchers. I also have friends, who are working adults, who lamented of our local public universities’ poor ranking. I even recalled my friends telling me that filling in questionnaires distributed by students are just a waste of time. I could only shake my head now because it is these very people, who are business practitioners, who might have contributed to a low number of research publications in the top-tier journals.

I was deeply disappointed because it is the business practitioners who are complaining about our local universities and yet they are the one who do not lend support to our local academic business researchers. Another classmate of mine, who is a head of an accounting department, agreed with me that many practitioners are ignorant about research and are not willing to let researchers come in to their organisations. It seems like our local business practitioners are practising a ‘closed door policy’ towards researchers.

How are we, Malaysian academic researchers are able to produce world quality research when many of these practitioners are refusing access to researchers? I am aware that many of my peers resorted to go ‘underground’ by distributing questionnaires to their network of friends working in some specific organisations instead of asking official permission directly from those organisations. And it began to sink in my mind that this is the only practical way to conduct research and distribute questionnaires on our Malaysian shore.