Raymond J. Chambers\u27 contributions to the development of accounting thought

Raymond J. Chambers was an internationally recognized scholar, influential theorist, as well as an important contributor to the study of the history of accounting thought. He was an advocate of the needs of financial statement users. He investigated what users, not accountants, considered important and what in fact was relevant to their decision-making. He challenged existing theoretical propositions which he believed were only rationalization of current practices. He argued that the lack of a rigorously developed theory of accounting led to contradictory and less relevant accounting practices. In his theory of continuously contemporary accounting (CoCoA), he demonstrated with logic and evidence that only an accounting system based on market selling prices is relevant to users\u27 evaluation and decision-making process. Chambers dedicated a significant amount of his most recent work to his Thesaurus [1995] and to the origins and developments of conventional accounting. He endeavored to refute the widely held assumption that cost-based accounting is a superior rule. Besides launching Abacus in 1965, his works, Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behavior [1966] and An Accounting Thesaurus [1995] are among Chambers\u27 notable contributions to the accounting literature

Enhancing the accessibility of accounting and business archives : the role of technology in informing research in accounting and business

The application of advanced digitization technologies to accounting and business archives has created new opportunities for accounting and business historians. The joint American Accounting Association and European Accounting Association Task Force (2006-2010) that examined digitization confirmed this. This paper explores these opportunities, along with some attendant challenges and cautions, with reference to the digitization of two significant archives located in Australia. The first is the archive of CPA Australia, a professional accounting association that has its beginnings in 1886 and which today has over 132,000 members. The second is the archive accumulated by the pre-eminent accounting scholar Raymond Chambers during his long and extraordinarily productive tenure at the University of Sydney. Studies of surviving business records, biography and institutional history provide examples of scholarship that is enabled by digitization technology and which has the capacity to inform contemporary issues and debates.C