Cooper has pushed our understanding of three aspects of accounting practice. First, his research on the
political economy of accounting during the 1980s, helped to incite a vibrant research tradition on the role of accounting numbers in social struggle. Political economy of accounting approaches acknowledge that accounting numbers both selectively re-present social reality and act as a distributional mechanism for allocating societal resources. These insights have been taken up and used to study a variety of public interest accounting topics such as
environmental reporting as well as class and gender-based aspects of financial reporting. Second, Cooper’s research on the accounting profession has illuminated the intersections among public accounting firm practices, the organization of the accounting profession, and the associated societal-level consequences. This stream of research draws upon the sociology of the professions literature, extending this literature to show how the accounting profession is similar yet different from other professions such as medicine and law. The research also traces how globalization has impacted on the organization and activities of public accounting. Third, Cooper has theorized and practiced the role of the specific, public intellectual. Building on the insights of
Foucault and
Bourdieu, Cooper showed the importance of using accounting expertise to intervene in the public sphere. The interventions included the United Kingdom Coal Board interventions in the 1980s as well as the debt/deficit interventions and privatization interventions in Canada in the 1990s. More recently, Cooper has served as a board member and resident accounting expert for the
Parkland Institute, a Canadian-based public think-tank. == Intellectual lineage ==