Accounting: A General Commentary on an Empirical Science

Many researchers have questioned the view of accounting as a science. Some maintain that it is a service activity rather than a science, yet others entertain the view that it is an art or merely a technology. While it is true that accounting provides a service and is a technology (a methodology for recording and reporting), that fact does not prevent accounting from being a science. Based upon the structure and knowledge base of the discipline, this paper presents the case for accounting as an empirical science

'Alas Poor Hicks', Indeed! Sixty Years of Use and Abuse-Commentary on Bromwich "et al".

Alas indeed! We might well wonder whether Professor Ray Chambers would have had the same reservations about using ‘Alas poor Hicks’ to describe what he perceived to be the ‘carelessness and indifference . . . [of] . . . so many . . . who clutched [so] indiscriminately at [Hicks' notion of income]’ had he experienced the matters which Bromwich et al. explain in their ‘Hicksian Income . . .’ in this issue. In a recently discovered 1976 letter to Sir John Hicks (reproduced as an appendix to this comment—and to which there is no evidence in the Chambers Archive of any reply by Hicks) Ray Chambers commented on accountants' cavalier treatment of Hicks on Income, treatment similar to that by the IASB and FASB of which Bromwich et al. now rightly complain

The role of current cost accounting for financial reporting and regulation in utility industries

This article considers the role of accounting, in particular current cost accounting (CCA), in influencing perceptions of financial performance and consequently regulatory decisions in utility industries over the past 25 years. It examines the accounting practices of nationalized industries, and how privatization affected accounting in utilities. It concludes with a discussion of more recent developments in relation to regulatory accounts and their role in regulatory decision-making

Accounting Principles, Internal Conflict and the State: The Case of the ICAEW, 1948-1966

The series of Recommendations on Accounting Principles (RoAPs) issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) between 1942 and 1969 demonstrated the willingness of a professional accounting body to take a degree of responsibility for the form and content of British corporate financial reports. RoAPs 12 and 15 focused on the enduring problem of whether and how to take account of changing prices when constructing published financial reports. This article reveals disagreement between practising and industrial members in general, concerning how to address this issue, and examines the way in which the Council of the ICAEW sought to resolve this internal conflict within the constraints imposed by the need to be seen to behave in the ‘public interest’. Major discord between the two main categories of membership emerged within the operation of the Taxation and Financial Relations (T&FR) Committee. What were judged by the ICAEW's leadership to be the extreme views of the industrial members were marginalized and suppressed by bypassing the normal channel for designing RoAPs and, instead, formulating them at the higher level of the Parliamentary and Law (P&L) Committee. The conflict between practising and industrial members continued in the period following the publication of RoAP 15, when further attempts were made to tackle the problem of accounting for inflation