1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers with introduction by Murray Wells (Chairman and Professor, University of Sydney); Induction citation by Daniel L. Jensen (Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems College of Business, The Ohio State University); Response by Raymond John Chambers (Professor Emeritus of Accounting University of Sydney, Australia

Chambers, R. J.

Jensen, Daniel L.

Wells, M. C.

English

eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi)

Accounting Historians Journal Volume 19 Issue 1 June 1992 Article 4 1992 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers M. C. Wells Daniel L. Jensen R. J. Chambers Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aah_journal  Part of the Accounting Commons, and the Taxation Commons Recommended Citation Wells, M. C.; Jensen, Daniel L.; and Chambers, R. J. (1992) "1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers," Accounting Historians Journal: Vol. 19 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aah_journal/vol19/iss1/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Archival Digital Accounting Collection at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Accounting Historians Journal by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction 81 INDUCTION CITATION by Daniel L. Jensen Ernst & Young Professor of Accounting Department of Accounting and Management Information Systems College of Business, The Ohio State University Among the most accomplished and respected accounting academicians in the world, he lists his recreations as "reading, writing and arithmetic". A voracious reader with a formidable vocabulary, he has even been known to study the dictionary. Possessed by a strong desire to see language used correctly, he studies the roots of words and their derivation. When he uses a word, you can be assured that it is the right word in the context. What other accounting professor uses the word "floccinaucini-hilipilification"1 ? A very private person, he is devoted to his wife and their family — a son, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. He and his wife, Margaret, married for forty crowed years, share an interest in opera and usually have a season ticket for the Sydney opera season. He is known as an effective administrator in part because he could not be bothered wasting time on it. He dealt only with things that mattered. He made the important decisions, left the running of programs to those most directly involved, and got back to his "real" work. Taking advantage of his open door policy, his colleagues could walk into his office at will to argue a point, seek clarification, or get help with a reference. He would be writing when they walked in, put down his pen immediately, and give them his full attention. When the discussion was over, and that was sometimes hours later, he would pick up his pen and just carry on writing as if he had not been interrupted. A mean debater, he never forced his ideas on his colleagues, al-though on occasion he would talk for hours in efforts to con-vince them of the correctness of his arguments. In this intense and exciting atmosphere, he founded a jour-nal, Abacus, and forged with his colleagues a school of account-ing built on a belief in the primacy of market prices. Indeed, that school of thought usually bears his name. A critic in the 1The habit of treating things as trivial, as of no account. 1Wells et al.: 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. ChambersPublished by eGrove, 199282 The Accounting Historians Journal, June 1992 tradition of Canning, Hatfield, MacNeal, Paton, and Sweeney, he has looked to economics, psychology, and science for evi-dence. His publications, which include numerous books and over 200 articles, are representatives of the turning point in the accounting literature away from descriptions of technical pro-cess towards rigorous debate based on scientific method. Fur-ther, he was not willing merely to understand what accountants do; he sought to bring about change, to improve both the study and the practice of accounting. For over forty years, he has made many lecture tours at universities throughout the world. He won the Gold Medal awarded by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, he was the first International Distinguished Lecturer of the American Accounting Association. More than a dozen professors of accounting have studied under him or been his colleague during their formative years. He served as National President of the Australian Society of Ac-countants (now called the Australian Society of CPAs) which shows his commitment to the interaction between academe and the profession, and he holds many other awards and distinc-tions including Officer of the Order of Australia and member of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. For all of these accomplishments, he is named the 51st inductee into the Ac-counting Hall of Fame, the first one from a "Pacific Rim" coun-try. RAYMOND JOHN CHAMBERS 2Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 19 [1992], Iss. 1, Art. 4https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aah_journal/vol19/iss1/41991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction 83 RESPONSE by Raymond John Chambers 1991 Hall of Fame Inductee Professor Emeritus of Accounting University of Sydney, Australia The Accounting Hall of Fame is unique, for here are joined in one roster practitioners and scholars. It signifies that each group contributes in some substantial way to the advancement of one art. But the modes of contribution are essentially differ-ent. Practice demands great versatility, patience and compre-hension, to match the exigencies of diverse clients with the per-formance of a socially necessary task. Scholars and teachers, on the other hand, serve no immediate clients. Ideally, they are the monitors of practice in general, discriminators between what is generally serviceable and what is merely expedient. The essen-tial difference between practice and inquiry was captured by Francis Bacon, 400 years ago: "lookers on many times see more than gamesters". More recently, J. B. Priestley expressed the same idea thus: "Nobody in his senses would expect a born seer to do. That much is generally acknowledged. But it is equally ridiculous to suppose that a clashing and triumphant doer can really see." In that little bit of philosophy lies the reason why practice and inquiry, in most learned professions, proceed in tandem, practitioners and investigators doing their own thing with their special skills, each respecting the domain and the competencies of the other. In accounting, it is still otherwise. Teachers and researchers on a large scale confuse the generally serviceable with the merely expedient. They have long tried to give the same stand-ing to the habitual and conventional as might properly be given to firm knowledge and principle. The attempt has been in vain. The very terms expedient and conventional betray a difference between mere rules and defensible principles. Confusion of the two has led some academics to hold that "there is no theoretical basis for preferring one set of techniques over another," and "that we should abandon the chimera that we can ever establish a unified theoretical framework for accounting". There has even developed a strong strain of disbelief in the possibility of mak-ing accounting better than it is, in spite of its logical and practi-cal flaws, flaws that have long been the butt of criticisms of 3Wells et al.: 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. ChambersPublished by eGrove, 199284 The Accounting Historians Journal, June 1992 practitioners, academics, governmental officials, and business people alike. On the other hand, there have been great practitioners who have dreamed of a better accounting than was prevalent in their time — among them George O. May, Leonard Spacek and Henry Benson, to name just three enrolled in the Hall of Fame. Who but Henry, Lord Benson, could, in the British House of Lords, describe "annual accounting prepared under the histori-cal cost convention" as "no better than laudable pus"? Dreaming of ideals is thus not just the special province of academics and researchers. The practicing arm of the profession has striven mightily to ameliorate practice, through countless deliberative committees over decades. Doubtless there is virtue in pooling the wisdom of the practically knowledgeable. And, doubtless, where what is taught in textbooks and universities is an undifferentiated mixture of principles and expedients, the com-bined wisdom of committees of practitioners has seemed to be more promising than reliance on the work of independent re-search workers; but that enterprise, too, has failed, in spite of the devoted labor and goodwill of members of committee after committee after committee in this country and elsewhere for decades. Which should not be surprising; for in no other field of knowledge and practice is recourse taken to deliberative com-mittees to resolve fundamental problems. The fundamental questions are: What is the function of ac-counting? and, How may that function best be served? The gen-eral function of accounting is singular — to get at the truth in financial matters. Only up-to-date truth will secure that persons entrusted with power over property and the work and prospects of others do not exercise that power ignorantly, or in a wanton or self-serving fashion. Getting at the truth thus has a highly respectable social role. It is a powerful disciplinary influence for good in business, government, and society at large. Trust, hon-esty, and fair dealing between those who trust and those who are entrusted, turn on truthfulness, truthfulness in accounting, in particular. It must therefore be of serious concern that disre-gard for the truth is endemic in modern accounting. Practitio-ners and teachers alike tolerate and justify the notion of conser-vatism — which means telling less than the truth; the cost doc-trine — which entails evasion of the up-to-date truth; and cre-ative accounting — which plainly means tinkering massively with, or disregarding utterly, the truth. To eradicate such mis-chievous notions is demanding of the greatest and most altruis-4Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 19 [1992], Iss. 1, Art. 4https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aah_journal/vol19/iss1/41991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction 85 tic endeavors of the profession — practitioners and academics in double harness. They are still at cross purposes, however. To quote Henry Benson more extensively: "until we . . . learn that . . . annual accounts prepared under the historical cost convention are no better than laudable pus, so long will a large number of our businesses move remorselessly and deservedly to the mortuary". But at the same time a substantial segment of the academic profession seeks to propagate the notion that conventional ac-counts are not misleading; and it does so by recourse to the trappings of statistical analysis that not only are incomprehen-sible to, and therefore beyond appraisal by, practitioners, but also are the object of critical utterances of mathematicians, economists, physicists and philosophers alike. Fruitful collabo-ration between practitioner and academic is unlikely to flourish where the two sectors of the profession entertain antithetical ideas. Mutual and deserved respect and goodwill between practi-tioners and researchers in other professions have been at the root of great advances in knowledge and technology. A similarly fruitful partnership in accounting is devoutly to be wished for. But it is not an end attainable as long as practitioners put little trust in independent researchers, researchers concern them-selves more with methodological niceties than with the funda-mental conditions of serviceable practice, and teachers concern themselves with propagating the conventional wisdom regard-less of its follies. I have long encountered the names, and many of the per-sons, of those honored in the Accounting Hall of Fame, profes-sional leaders of eminence and scholars of great reputation. My engagements through most of my professional life have involved me in the struggles and anxieties of both sectors of the profes-sion. If I have done anything notable, it has been because I have been able to draw on the wisdom and stand on the shoulders of many masters, great in their time and in the vocation of their choice. But, on the other side of the equator and the other side of the Pacific, I thought not that I would be summoned today to join such company. To The Ohio State University and the Board of Nomina-tions, custodians of the Hall of Fame, to kind advocates un-known to me, I express my deep gratitude for and appreciation of this day's mark of esteem. 5Wells et al.: 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. ChambersPublished by eGrove, 199286 The Accounting Historians Journal, June 1992 THE ACCOUNTING HALL OF FAME MEMBERSHIP Year Member 1950 George Oliver May* Robert Hiester Montgomery* William Andrew Paton* 1951 Arthur Lowes Dickinson* Henry Rand Hatfield* 1952 Elijah Watt Sells* Victor Hermann Stempf* 1953 Arthur Edward Andersen* Thomas Coleman Andrews* Charles Ezra Sprague* Joseph Edmund Sterrett* 1954 Carman George Blough* Samuel John Broad* Thomas Henry Sanders* Hiram Thompson Scovill* 1955 Percival Flack Brundage* 1956 Ananias Charles Littleton* 1957 Roy Bernard Kester* Hermann Clinton Miller* 1958 Harry Anson Finney* Arthur Bevins Foye* Donald Putman Perry* 1959 Marquis George Eaton* 1960 Maurice Hubert Stans 1961 Eric Louis Kohler* 1963 Andrew Barr Lloyd Morey* 1964 Paul Franklin Grady* Perry Empey Mason* 1965 James Loring Pierce 1968 George Davis Bailey* John Lansing Carey* William Welling Werntz* 1974 Robert Martin Trueblood* 1975 Leonard Paul Spacek 1976 John William Queenan 1977 Howard Irwin Ross* *Deceased 6Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 19 [1992], Iss. 1, Art. 4https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aah_journal/vol19/iss1/41991 Accounting Hall of Fame Induction 87 1978 Robert Kuhn Mautz 1979 Maurice Moonitz 1980 Marshall Smith Armstrong 1981 Elmer Boyd Staats 1982 Herbert Elmer Miller 1983 Sidney Davidson 1984 Henry Alexander Benson 1985 Oscar Strand Gellein 1986 Robert Newton Anthony 1987 Philip Leroy Defliese 1988 Norton Moore Bedford 1989 Yuji Ijiri 1990 Charles Thomas Horngren 1991 Raymond John Chambers 7Wells et al.: 1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. ChambersPublished by eGrove, 1992

1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers

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1991 Accounting Hall of Fame induction: Raymond J. Chambers

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