Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought – serie

This book is a biographical study of the first full-time accounting professor in a US university. Henry Rand Hatfield (1866-1945) was the first dean of the Chicago business school and the second dean of the Berkeley business school, and he was long regarded as the "dean of accounting teachers everywhere". His two textbooks, "Modern Accounting" (1909) and "Accounting" (1927), were among the most respected reference works in the first half century, and they and his articles continue to be cited today. His textbooks and carefully crafted articles were veritable annotations on the accounting literature and drew extensively on accounting and legal authorities in the US and overseas. He exemplified a principled approach to accounting debate and discussion, and he skewered sloppy and imprecise terminology and shoddy thinking. He did not propound any grand theories but was instead an astute critic of the literature, a delectable writer, and, above all, a consummate scholar. Hatfield was an authority on early bookkeeping history, and his essay, "An Historical Defense of Bookkeeping", has long been one of the most celebrated articles in the US literature. Professor Basil Yamey has written a commentary expressly for the book on Hatfield as a historian of accounting and bookkeeping. Stephen Zeff began his research in the 1960s, when he was granted access to Hatfield's extensive files of correspondence, notes and papers, and he proceeded to interview, or correspond with, many of Hatfield's former colleagues and students. The author also drew on the archives at the Northwestern University, the University of Chicago and the University of California, as well as the records of the American Accounting Association, of which Hatfield was a founder and President. The book is rich in references to primary sources. Many of Hatfield's unpublished and previously published papers are reproduced in the book, which also contains a complete list of Hatfield's publications, including his more than 50 penetrating book reviews.

"Foundations for the Future" documents the many significant events that impacted the accounting profession during the years 1980-1995. This time period was critical for our profession. The AICPA membership doubled and the nature of services offered to clients was dramatically transformed. The profession was on the cutting edge of the tremendous changes that occurred within the American business community during this time period. This book tells the story of how the profession adapted to these changes and the challenges that accompanied them. It not only lays down the facts for future generations, but also portrays our profession as an important and exciting field in which to work.

Maurice Peloubet's autobiography lends an insight into the thinking of an influential practitioner of the early 20th Century American CPA Profession. Peloubet was Vice President and Treasurer of the American Institute of Accountants [now the AICPA], as well as a National Director of the National Association of Cost Accountants, now the Institute of Management Accountants. He was a driving force in the firm Pogson, Peloubet & Co, whose prestigious New York Stock Exchange mining company clients included Anaconda, Phelps Dodge, Newmont and others. In 1963, his firm was merged into Price Waterhouse & Co., now PriceWaterhouseCoopers. In 1975, Professor Alfred R. Roberts, of Georgia State University discovered the unpublished memoirs of Maurice Peloubet [d. 1976]. Professor Roberts and his colleagues have completed the process of preparing the manuscript for publication. Skillfully edited, this volume details the key role which Peloubet played in many events affecting modern day professionals, including the federal legislation involving inventory techniques. A prolific writer, thoughtful professional, and, on occasion poet, the volume identifies the many works authored by Peloubet during his lengthy and important career.

This volume describes the development of accounting thought during the twentieth century by focusing on a relatively narrow and long-lived issue, income smoothing. The task begins with the creation and description of three taxonomies of income smoothing literature in order to identify the context and bounds of the preferences and behavior that are to be the subject of the study. Then a chronological review of English-language literature referring to income smoothing behavior is conducted that covers the period, 1893 through 1998. The review starts with literature discussing secret reserves created so that fat years could pay for lean years and moves to income smoothing as a criterion for accounting choice. This literature on the smoothing criterion provided motivation for some of the earliest modern empirical studies in accounting. Empirical studies of smoothing have continued at a fairly constant rate since 1966 and make up a substantial portion of the literature review. A modification of the conventional smoothing hypothesis is proposed at the conclusion of the narrative that takes into account some relevant variables that tend to be overlooked because of the fragmentation of the literature. An extensive annotated bibliography and other appendices provide important supplements to the narrative.

This volume faithfully reproduces the public correspondence between Mr. Thomas A. Murphy, former Board Chairman of General Motors Corporation, and two accounting leaders, during the latter two's term of service as Chair of the Financial Accounting Standards Board [FASB]. The volume provides evidence of Murphy's importance as a thoughtful and influential accounting theorist, whose ideas are shared in the context of the open standard setting process adopted by the FASB. The chronological sequence of these letters provides the reader with a sense of momentum around a variety of important technical topics from consolidations through stock compensation. It also addresses a variety of other matters such as the importance of the Board's role as an independent standard setting agency. Also included are references to materials supplied in support of the correspondence and speech materials which relate to points of discussion in the correspondence. This volume represents a unique contribution to the literature of accounting thought for classroom and related use by scholars, practitioners and standard setters.

This is a collection of eleven essays authored by prominent accounting historians and designed to aid potential as well as experienced researchers in the methodologies and resources available for scholarly work in accounting history. The project, of which this book is the end product, has the full endorsement and backing of the Academy of Accounting Historians. Chapters on resources include the finding and utilization of archival materials (including ancient forms); the growing importance of the Internet in historical research and the Accounting Research Database as a vital, contemporary finding aid; the possibilities for joint venturing with accounting practitioners and their organizations; and the pivotal influence and immediacy of oral history. Methodological chapters explore the advantages and pitfalls of archival research; the synergistic relationships that exist between accounting and economic history, including business history and capital-markets research; the techniques for doing biography; and the issues involved in writing to historical paradigms.

Is the average accountant being strangled by overregulation? Have traditional accounting and auditing practices been misunderstood and unfairly maligned? Can anything be done to reverse these damaging trends? In the 1984 edition of this book, Eugene H. Flegm gave an emphatic yes to all three questions. However, none of his suggestions were followed and today the condition of the accounting profession (defined as to include those in business as well as public accounting) is in dire straits. The regulators - FASB, SEC and the AICPA - have continued to overwhelm practicing accountants with a continuation of detailed rules making. In this updated version of his book, Mr. Flegm explains the causes of the current crisis, how the accounting profession and the FASB failed to deal with the developing problems 20 years ago, and how there is still some hope that the integrity of the profession can be restored. He reiterates his basic belief that only an historical cost based system can be used to establish the badly needed reliability in financial data which after all is why financial statements are relevant at all. He also brings to question whether or not the AICPA and the public auditing firms have not forfeited their self regulation franchise.

Stuart Chase (1888-1985) is truly a man for all times. Still remembered by liberals in their 70s and 80s, he is now unknown by all too many. Chase was a CPA, as was his father and grand uncle, and was a longtime accountant. Chase speaks loudly and effectively for 2005 and beyond to accountants, and all others, concerned about waste, conservation, social action, justice and change, ethics and fairness. His 1925 "The Tragedy of Waste" remains the best work ever written on waste. Hopefully, this book on Stuart Chase will be in the forefront of a revitalization of the works and person of Stuart Chase. His chronology in this book traces his vitality from 1888 on. Richard Vangermeersch is an emeritus professor in accounting at the University of Rhode Island. He has published numerous books and articles on the history of accounting. He is a past president of the Academy of Accounting Historians and a past chair of its trustees. He was co-convenor of the 10th World Congress of Accounting Historians in 2004.

2004 marked the 150th anniversary of the foundation of institutionalised public accountancy in the English-speaking world. The mid nineteenth century founders were public accountants practicing in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. Their historical legacy is a respected profession world-wide that offers a complex range of public accountancy and other services to industry, commerce, and government. This book celebrates this legacy in biographies of 138 accountants involved in the creation of three professional bodies that combined to form the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) in 1951. The biographies are presented within a historical context of Scotland at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria and reveal the economic and social class structure that characterised Victorian times. Many of the founders were members of families that profoundly influenced Scottish history in a variety of ways. Others had more humble origins. The biographies therefore attempt to capture not only the background of the founders but also their achievements in terms of careers, families, and friends. The book should be of interest to public accountants wishing to understand the historical foundations on which their profession is based. It is also relevant to social historians studying the impact of emerging professions on the economic, political, and social landscape of nineteenth century Scotland particularly and Britain more widely.

The main purpose of this volume is to organize, examine, and analyze the works of John Lansing Carey, the longest serving chief staff officer of the AICPA. Through his many articles, books, pamphlets, and editorials, he influenced and directed the thoughts of the practitioners of the time. The second purpose is to demonstrate the role of John Lansing Carey as a quiet leader among the accounting professionals and as the glue that held the AICPA together through the numerous and varied administrations. Finally, this volume examines the lasting impression that Carey's writing has made and aims to expand the body of accounting history. A biography of John Lansing Carey, it represents an important chapter in the history of the accounting profession. It organizes, examines and analyzes the works of John L. Carey. It demonstrates the role of John Lansing Carey as a leader among the accounting professionals. It examines the lasting impression that Carey's writing has made.

This set of volumes places the labor markets, workplaces, jobs and workers of Europe in comparative perspective. It focuses on the politics, economics, sociology, and history of work and workers in Europe. Authors contribute a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives, with papers that push the boundaries of evidence and argument. In order to place European workers in comparative perspectives, the volume features articles that analyze specific European countries, industries and firms, analyze Europe as one of a few cases, and analyze many European countries within a cross-national sample. Specific topics covered include: a multilevel study of perceived job insecurity in 27 European countries; work values and job rewards among European workers; managerial intensity and earnings inequality in affluent democracies; cross-national patterns in individual and household employment and work hours by gender and parenthood; the political economy of active social policy in postindustrial democracies; social protection dualism, deindustrialization and cost containment; organized labor in Europe; and, unionization in East European ex-communist countries.

The Enron and WorldCom scandals and other less high profile scandals ushered in several regulatory overhauls including those provided for under the law widely known as Sarbanes-Oxley. Indeed, this was the most dynamic period save possibly the 1930s in terms of regulatory reforms to the accounting and financial reporting environment. This monograph summarizes and synthesize a decade of academic research to develop an evolving dominant explanation around these myriad changes. The overarching themes and topics in the literature that form the paradigm for this monograph include the evolving accounting and reporting model in the U.S. and internationally, the individual accounting pronouncements that support the evolving model, the scandals themselves, and the public and private sector responses to those scandals.

Drawing upon established academic theory, the study argues that the Big Four, as part of a globalizing transnational capital class, has dominated indigenous firms by bringing to China an ideology that came to be accepted as normative. By winning this battle of ideology, the Big Four gained access to the coercive power of the State, and to the power of transnational institutions that have subsumed part of the power of the State. Indigenous firms have pursued a counter-hegemonic strategy of undermining the ideological superiority of the Big Four through the infiltration and modification of institutional arrangements following what the academic literature calls "the long march through the institutions.

"Management Accounting at the Hudson's Bay Company: From Quill Pen to Digitization describes the 1670 to 2005 evolution of management accounting at the longest surviving commercial company in the world. This book was possible for the extraordinary reason that by plan, and the nature of HBC's early business, the company retained virtually all management accounting documents. Through the viewpoint of management accounting, the book also tells the story of Anglo-American evolution of double-entry bookkeeping for managing companies. A study of 335 years may seem daunting until recognizing that management accounting does not change often, and changes are exciting, dramatic and consequential. Five significant sets of management accounting changes were identified, each made for significant strategic or more precisely for survival reasons. Thus, the focus of this book is on the making and remaking of management accounting to support survival strategy. A serious lesson is that management accounting can be difficult to change and without insightful managers, existing management accounting is allowed to survive well beyond its usefulness."

This book sheds light on the interpenetration process between practice and theory of "Japanese management accounting" by using historical methods. Japanese management accounting can be characterized by the fact that, while paying attention to one aspect of accounting, i.e. "invisibility," it not only emphasizes the management of entities, such as JIT, cell-type production systems, other production control systems, and kaizen activities but also attempts to resolve "invisibility" as a part of upstream management through both "combined use" and "zurashi (displacement)" of target costing, kaizen costing and cost maintaining. Then it describes the process in which independent technology is formed as such features interrelate in Toyota and other Japanese companies. It focusses institutional and cultural significance of Japanese management accounting by the two perspectives, "Invisibility and Accounting: Archeology, Genealogy and Efficiency" and "Creativity and Cultural Editing to Link Person/Thing, Event and Memories." The history of Japanese management accounting from mid-19th century to 1960s is examined. Target costing practice and theoretical background at Toyota is also explained.

Volume 20 of Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought (SDAT) is another fine example of informative and reflective analysis in the series. SDAT again provides readers with the firm historical foundations on which the profession is based, the historical antecedents of today’s accounting institutions, the historical impact of accounting, as well as exploring the lives and works of pre-eminent individuals in the profession’s history. Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought focuses on bringing the past into today and using it to point towards the future.

Richard Mattessich’s Accounting and Analytical Methods (1964) and Yuji Ijiri’s Theory of Accounting Measurement (1975) are two classic works of American accounting literature written by eminent scholars. Mattessich’s work contributed to the debate around the role of accountants in designing systems, and it made a sweeping case for accounting as a management science within an emerging interdisciplinary movement. Ijiri focused on proposing a theory of conventional accounting as an accounting system, which has facilitated accountability among interested parties during five centuries. Understanding Mattessich and Ijiri takes a 21st-century view of these authors and their work, which was well ahead of its time in the challenges it offered to formidable institutional arrangements. This volume revivifies Mattessich’s and Ijiri’s emphases on processes and circumstances irreducible to rigorous study, which since the 1960s has been the primary focus of accounting literature, and it re-examines important axiomatic views as foundations for accounting research, views to which both scholars dedicated their early careers. Ultimately, this work examines how their ideas fit with emerging economic theories and technologies which neither could have foreseen, and which now compete for attention when it comes to understanding the intricacy of capital and income measurement.

For more than 70 years, William Paton contributed his considerable energy and knowledge to the development of accounting thought. He was one of the early accounting educators to express the high purpose of accounting and its importance in the university, and he was among the early theorists in accounting to argue that accounting needed a coherent, theoretical structure that would guide the accountant in preparing financial statements. Yet a full account of his life, career, and ideas has not yet appeared. Kelly L. Williams and Howard J. Lawrence address this gap, painting an intimate and comprehensive portrait of this deeply influential figure. Their groundbreaking study not only explores major influences on Paton’s thoughts on accounting, but also shows how Paton was an active participant in the professional accounting organizations of his day, how early on he urged the societies to conduct research to develop a consistent and rational body of knowledge, and how, with other early scholars, he was instrumental in developing the first issues of The Accounting Review—a beginning that helped make the Review the outstanding publication it is today. Ultimately, the authors demonstrate why Paton received practically every major honor an accounting educator could receive, including recognition in 1987 by the AICPA as the “Educator of the Century.” As the only comprehensive study of Paton’s life and thought, this is a must-have for graduate students of accountancy and researchers of accounting history and theory, and it is of keen interest to anyone who wishes to develop their own research methodology and pedagogy through a study of one of the greatest thinkers and educators in the history of accountancy.

Harold Cecil Edey (1913–2007) and his colleagues David Solomons (1912–1995) and William T. Baxter (1907–2006) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) were instrumental in the development of British accounting thought in the mid-1900s. These three influential scholars influenced a generation of students who came to populate the British accounting profession and academia to the point where, in the early 1970s, half of all full-time accounting professors in the United Kingdom were LSE alumni. Edey’s role in these developments, however, remains relatively underappreciated. This edited volume contains 13 of Edey’s unpublished manuscripts written during the heyday of the LSE Triumvirate. These manuscripts address issues of accounting education, measurements, and theory, and they are accompanied by editorial comments that put the material in its historical context. The volume also contains an aide-mémoire of Edey’s professional activities and a complete bibliography of his published work. The material offers new insight into Edey’s contribution to the British accounting profession, and developments at the LSE, during a critical period of academic expansion and struggle to address the problem of accounting for rising inflation. The material is of value to anyone interested in the development of accounting thought.

This latest volume of Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought, edited by Martin E. Persson, contains ten manuscripts, seven being previously unpublished, authored by C. Richard Baker during an academic career that spans four decades.Historical Developments in the Accountancy Profession, Financial Reporting, and Accounting Theory is divided into two thematic sections. The first covers developments in accounting thought on financial reporting and the accountancy profession, whereas the second section covers developments related to accounting measurements and theory.The historical examination of the development of accounting thought serves as a unifying theme throughout this edited volume, which attempts to pick up on various understudied threads of academic and professional initiatives over the past several hundred years. The material is of value to anyone interested in the intellectual history of the accounting discipline.

Volume 26 of Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought was written by the late Professor Kevin Christopher Carduff, who taught at several institutions including Case Western Reserve University and the College of Charleston.Establishing a historical account explaining financial reporting’s current form, Corporate Reporting examines the complete annual reports from 1902 to 2006 of The United States Steel Corporation – the first United States’ company to attain the billion-dollar capitalization in U.S. markets.Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought informs readers of the historical foundations on which the profession is based, the historical antecedents of today’s accounting institutions, the historical impact of accounting, as well as exploring the lives and works of pre-eminent individuals in the profession’s history. The series focuses on bringing the past into today and using it to point towards the future. Topics featured include finding and utilizing archival materials; the growing importance of the Internet in historical research; the issues involved in writing to historical paradigms; and the pivotal influence and immediacy of oral history.

Persistence and Vigilance: A View of Ford Motor Company's Accounting Over Its First Fifty Years is an exploration of the financial leadership that guided the company through periods of phenomenal growth amidst the economic and political upheaval of the early 20th century.Since its inception in 1903, the Ford Motor Company has implemented traditional accounting methods, as well as innovative financial reporting and business policies, to navigate industry competition, two world wars, and labor issues such as the famous $5 day. While much has been written on the presumption of Henry Ford's indifference to the financial details of operating the company that bore his name, there remains much to be said for the talented individuals working behind the scenes to spearhead the day-to-day financial and operational policies of the company. This includes initial co-founder James Couzens, super salesman and accountant Norval Hawkins, loyal Frank Klingensmith, and turn-around specialist Ernest Breech, among others. It was through their skill, persistence, and acumen that accounting policies and procedures evolved within the Ford Motor Company alongside the welcomed support of Edsel Ford, who was widely respected in his vision for strong financial oversight and organizational structure.From archival information found in the Benson Ford Research Center, this book describes the accounting and financial reporting methods utilized by the company through its years of growth, wartime production, economic downturns, and eventual restructuring under the presidency of Henry Ford II. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Ford Motor Company, as well as those curious about the application of accounting within the fast-growing automotive industry in the early to mid-1900s.

"Studies in the Development of Accounting Thought" works to inform readers of the historical foundations on which the profession is based, the historical antecedents of today's accounting institutions, the historical impact of accounting, as well as exploring the lives and works of pre-eminent individuals in the profession's history. Recent volumes have addressed: the founders of accounting in mid-nineteenth century and the origins of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland; the life and work of accountant Stuart Chase (1888-1985), and his concerns about waste, conservation, social action, justice, ethics and fairness; and the evolving nature of accounting regulation, looking at the overwhelming number of systems and checks that practising accountants face in the wake of modern management fraud. The series is edited by Gary J. Previts, Past President of the American Accounting Association and Professor at Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University, and Robert Bricker, Professor and Ernst & Young Faculty Fellow at Weatherhead, CWRU.