DOCTORAL RESEARCH

MAUREEN H. BERRY, EDITOR
University of Illinois

From Conflict to Consensus: The American Institute of Accountants and the Professionalization of Public Accountancy, 18861940 (The John Hopkins University, 1985) by Paul Joseph Miranti, Jr.

“From Conflict to Consensus” is an ambitious work, examining the shaping of the American public accounting profession over the course of half a century through the prisms of four different schools of historical analysis. It addresses two broad research questions: what the experience of the American Institute of Accountants (AIA), and its predecessor organization the American Association of Public Accountants (AAPA), can disclose about the nature of the new American society which surfaced in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; and how an organizational structure and program for the public accounting profession was successfully developed by the AIA leadership.

The thesis is organized into four major parts in chronological progression, each with its own synthesizing summary. The first, “Seed Time for a Profession, 18861906”, describes the fledgling profession’s long gestation and infancy, covering the competition in New York for professional power, and the eventual merger of the American Association of Professional Accountants (AAPA) and the Federation of State Societies of Public Accountants in the United States of America. Part II, “The Greening of the New Profession, 19061916”, covers events in the decade of adolescence: how professional roles were defined, authority built up, and crisis over ruling influence in the profession confronted yet again. The third part, “The False Blossom, 19161929”, takes up the challenges and issues the accounting community had to deal with in interpreting moral dimensions and setting competency demarcations. “The Mature Harvest, 19291940” brings us to the profession’s coming of age with the creation of the AIA, the catalytic impact of the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934 on professional unification, and the budding of consensus which ensued.

In his first chapter, Miranti identified the four different sets of historical interpretation whose assumptions he tested as: Progressive, New Left, ManagerialTechnological, and Corporate Liberal. Summarized very briefly, progressive reformers perceived the major political and social reform movements of the past century as essentially resulting from struggles between liberals and conservatives. This competition finally brought on the successful establishment of a liberal state, with the New Deal, to protect American society from “corrupt business and political interests”. The New Left, on the other hand, had a completely opposite view of the picture, seeing the conservatives as the ultimate victors. The liberal reforms, it is posited, really came about through concessions made to protect conservative business interests in a new corporate state. Those in the managerialtechnological school emphasize the importance of the role played by technical skill in efficiently using America’s resources to produce past economic success, and which offer great growth potential for the future. The corporate liberal school offers yet another interpretation by focusing on interrelationships between business organizations, political groups, and governmental institutions. In its view, change in our modern society has resulted from compromise and accommodation between these main competing interests, rather than from triumphs of victors over the vanquished.

Miranti’s argument for choosing the development of the public accounting profession as the object of focus in evaluating these differing sets of analyses is that public accountants were one of the new and diverse types of knowledge specialists who appeared on the American scene during the late 1880s. Over the decades, these specialists grew in status to become interest groups, playing a major role in American life and in shaping public policy. Little research attention has, however, been directed towards placing these knowledge specialist interest groups in the context of major schools of historical interpretation.

What could have been predicted from historical interpretations? According to the progressives, the new knowledge specialists would naturally line up with the liberal reformers because they shared common aims of efficiency, progress, and “civic virtue”. Miranti’s findings, on the contrary, suggest that while the public accounting profession grew apace with reform movements, its primary concern lay in securing the interests of its own special skills. In this aim, it formed alliances, as and when needed, across the political spectrum. Miranti also questions the applicability of the thinking of the New Left. In the public accounting profession’s experience, political action came about through competitive struggles pitched between business rivals and had little, if anything, to do with horizontal class splits from the European tradition. The closest accord seems to lie with the corporate liberal historians. Factions in “competing elites”, as Miranti puts it (p. 324), “…were loosely united on the basis of economic, regional, ethnic, or national factors.” They worked together for common objectives, forging a system of checks and balances, recognizing that the continent was too large, and the opportunities too great, for a single group to go it alone successfully.

Debts to earlier research efforts which provided ideas and assistance are generously acknowledged. Among the most frequently referenced classics in this field are those by Carey,1 Edwards, and Previts and Merino. It would be appropriate here to refer to Lubell whose Ph.D. dissertation examining organizational conflict within the public accounting profession in the 1960s was completed in 1978.4 In Lubell’s paradigm of barriers to Professionalization (1980, p. 46), internal conflict constituted a significant internal constraint to professional development, as illustrated in the study of relationships between the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the National Society of Public Accountants. This paradigm would also seem to hold for Miranti’s work.

With his “From Conflict to Consensus” Miranti makes at least two significant contributions to the accounting history literature. By expanding the variety of possible historical interpretations, he has given us a very interesting account of how the accounting profession in the United States developed as it did, and advanced some ideas as to why it developed as it did. One could wish for less unobtrusiveness in references to the research methodologyemployed but it is still not fashionable in historiography to throw light on this area. The account is much richer for the language and the writing style which add to the pleasure for the reader.

REFERENCES

1Carey, John L. The Rise of the Accounting Profession: From Technicians to Professionals. Vol. 1 New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1969.
, The Rise of the Accounting Profession: To Responsibility and
Authority. Vol. 2, New York: American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, 1970.

2Edwards, James Don. History of Public Accounting in the United States. East Lansing, Michigan: Bureau of Business and Economic Research, Michigan State University, 1965.

3Previts, Gary John and Barbara Dubois Merino. A History of Accounting in America: An Historical Interpretation of the Historical Significance of Accounting. New York: John Wiley, 1979.

4Lubell, Myron Samuel. The Significance of Organizational Conflict on the Legislative Evolution of the Accounting Profession in the United States. New York: Arno Press, 1980.