Reviewed by Chris Poullaos University of New South Wales

The conclusion of a paper by R. J. Chambers published in 1950 expresses concern that “after reviewing the progress that has been made over the last twenty years in codifying account-ing concepts, some may feel that [my] discussion has upset the system of rules that was, till now, becoming accepted …” [Vol. I, p. 26]. The conclusion of a paper by the same author published in 1980 deals with the conditions under which the myths of accounting might be swept away while pointing out that “innovations take time” and decrying “the principle of unripe time” [Vol. III, p. 496]. In the intervening 30 years Chambers had, as well as persisting with his attempts to upset accept rules, developed and promoted an alternative to those rules; and he continues to do so. In the process he has constructed a coherent view of the function of accounting information within the social matrix in which it is embedded [Vol. III, p. 485]; of what the nature and structure of an accounting discipline might be, of the relationship between the academy and the practitioner, between the teacher and the researcher, the teacher and the student, the accountant and other specialists, between the accountant, management and other parties affected by the accountant’s work, between the history of accounting, its prob-lematic present and its potentially illustrious future, and be-tween accounting and other disciplines. Having begun his career among the trees his project spurred him to put together a novel and controversial view of the forest.

Chambers and his University of Sydney colleague Graeme Dean have performed a valuable task in pulling together into a five-volume collection (some of) the results of Chambers’ critical and constructive endeavours “against the current” in the period 1948 to 1985. There are a number of overlapping reasons why this collection might be of interest to accounting historians; a number of overlapping uses to which it might be put.

First, it can be used to elaborate (and test) the claim made by Lee [1987] and others that Chambers has had a significant influence on accounting thought. As evidence of his influence one would expect the positions found in these volumes — the arguments, the evidence, the forms of argument and so on, to be taken up by others. (Alternatively the impact may have come by means of resistance by others.) In addition, it can be used to trace the influence on Chambers of others from within and from outside the accounting literature [ibid]. In this regard it can be used to trace the importation into the accounting literature of the work of non-accountants, Chambers having long argued that the accounting theorist would do well to look beyond accounting itself (e.g., see the first essay in Vol. III).

Second, moving from the “individual” level, the collection might be used as one input into a study of relations between the accounting literature and other events, other levels of activity. Chambers and Dean themselves point out that the period in which the pieces in the collection were produced was one of substantial business growth, increasing stock market activity, rising public expenditure and tax collections, and occasional surges of inflation. It was a period in which there occurred changes in the scale and style of the accountancy profession and in the concerns of professional associations, instances of corporate failure and litigation raising issues about accounting and auditing practices, expansion in the number of accounting journals, accounting professors and accounting departments in universities and colleges, among other things [General Preface, Vol. I]. The reader can probably think of others not listed here and not listed by Chambers and Dean. How did these things affect Chambers’ work (and vice versa); how were they rep-resented in Chambers’ work compared to the work of others?

Third, as implied in the introduction to this review, Cham-bers’ work contains a detailed and as Whittington [1987, p. 842] points out, a perceptive critique of accounting practice (and discourse about such practice); however the alternative developed by Chambers has itself been the object of resistance and criticism. In short, the collection provides material for a case study of the emergence of and resistance to innovation in accounting. Why, for example, when alternatives to “historical cost” accounting were under serious consideration in a number of countries in the 1970s, was CoCoA not put forward by any professional association or government committee. (The collec-tion doesn’t answer this question but it does provide some of the data.)

Fourth, and closely related to the previous point, Chambers has engaged in academic debate, not just with “a wide range of the leading accounting theorists of the 1950s and ’60s” [ibid] but also with A. C. Littleton, Paton (pre-1950s), Ball and Brown, Beaver and Demski (post-1960s), amongst a great many others. In the course of doing so he gradually developed and then defended various aspects of the case for CoCoA against a wide variety of criticisms and approaches. Not only has he attacked “historical cost” accounting, and defended CoCoA against proponents of that style of accounting and alternative forms of “current value” accounting, but he has defended the importance of that debate as other issues and forms of research have become more fashionable. (For example, see Vol. III [pp. 195-212, 425-440, 462-481] and Vol. V [pp. 217-225]. The last paper in Volume 5 [pp. 489-507] is the fruit of belated attempts to engage in a more fashionable form of “empirical substantiation” [p. 491] than appears elsewhere in Chambers’ work). One result is that chronological reading of the papers in the collection provides a fascinating albeit partial view of shifts in academic accounting discourse from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s. Also noticeable is the persistence of certain positions. To take but one example, in the 1980 paper referred to above [Volume III, pp. 483-496] Chambers attacks the notion that “the income statement is superior to the balance sheet” [p. 495] — a position he had attacked in 1950 [Vol. I, pp. 50-51], if not earlier. (See Vol. I for other examples.)

On a different tack, Lee writes of the accounting theorist that: “His time will come again, and when it does, the work of Chambers will provide a firm foundation” [1987, p. 46]. In a more critical review Whittington has nevertheless written that “Chambers’ contribution to the development of accounting thought will be remembered as a significant one, and these five volumes will provide a permanent source of reference on the development of his ideas.” In support of these claims one may point to the rigor, scope and novelty of his work, his pugnacious and detailed articulations and defences of it and its empirical base, controversial though it might be. On the other hand, review of these volumes brings difficulties to mind as well. Without claiming to present an exhaustive discussion a number of issues can be raised.

First, even if one accepts Chambers’ defences of his method of observation (See for example Vol. III [pp. 386-405, 483-496]) it is still doubtful that it has been specified in sufficient detail for others to use it — in order to test it, in order to continue its use.

A second, more fundamental and more interesting order of difficulties — rather, of challenges — lies in the direction of up-dating the work in these volumes (and Accounting, Evalua-tion and Economic Behavior) in light of current work in “re-lated” disciplines (economics, history and philosophy of science, social theory, psychology, etc.) — a quintessentially Cham-berian project. Such an endeavour, in addition to positioning or re-positioning Chambers’ work in relation to mainstream stream trends in accounting (the positive accounting theorists, for example) would, in this reviewer’s opinion, require a detailed assessment of the literature inspiring what Chua [1986] has called the interpretive and critical alternatives to the mainstream. As Chua points out, these alternatives incorporate radically different beliefs about knowledge, about physical and social reality and about the relationship between theory and practice.

To pursue this point just a little, Chambers has long held that accounting could and should be both scientific (both as discipline and as practice) and neutral as between uses and users. Consider some of the conundrums which might arise in an attempt to reassess these (and related) positions. There is more involved than developing a position on whether accounting is an art or a science, or on whether standard-setting should be a scientific rather than a political process, or on whether or not the parties affected by accounting information are best left to deal with “accounting” issues themselves. Other issues are now on the agenda. For example, has the application of science been such an unqualfied success in other areas that we might wish to apply its methods to accounting (however defined)? Given the demise of the hypothetico-deductive model how does one re-connect the lessons of scientific endeavour to accounting, pre-suming one would wish to do so? How would one deal with the claim that the social or “human” sciences are fundamentally different from the natural sciences, the methods of one not being suitable to the other? If one accepts this point — is accounting a human science or is it something else? If one is sceptical about the belief that empirical reality is objective and external to the subject, where does this leave the potential of accounting to produce objective information about “social facts” [Vol. 1, p. 26]. If one does not concede the distinction between means and ends, fact and value; and if one is concerned that accounting functions as an ideological apparatus, incorporating concepts of value which benefit dominant groups in society, how is the notion of neutrality to be rescued? (For further discussion see Chua [1986]. The reader of Chua’s article will note that the issues raised here incorporate elements from both the critical and interpretative alternatives.)

A particularly interesting issue arising here is whether the outcome of an attempt to up-date Chambers’ work would be a case for CoCoA. Such an outcome is possible, maybe even likely (depending on who does it), but is by no means guaranteed. Then again, if such an exercise were done with sufficient care and sufficient rigor perhaps Chambers wouldn’t mind. What remains to be seen is: Who will be brave enough and competent enough to do it? In any case, even for such a project these volumes would be invaluable.

The five volumes between them contain more than 150 separate pieces spread over more than 2000 pages. Included are papers (and poems) published in academic and professional journals, in conference proceedings and in various other places; together with “a selection of texts of addresses and submissions to inquiries not otherwise published” [General Preface, Vol. I]. Volume I consists of “exercises in clarifying one aspect or another of [the] association . . . between funding, functional management, and financial information in the conduct of busi-ness affairs” [Preface to Vol. I]. Volume II includes material on “some aspects of practice, pedagogy, and prescripton”. The material in Volume III deals variously with “the general features of theories and theory construction, . . . the general modes of disciplined inquiry”; “relates to specific elements of some actual or potential theoretical discourse, to ideas or lines of argument that seemed to need clarification or refutation”; while “some of the pieces are retrospectives on the development of accounting ideas” [Preface to Volume III]. Volume IV contains some of Chambers’ early papers on “inflation accounting” and his critiques of various forms of accounting devised to deal with the problems arising from changing price levels. Volume V contains some seminal papers crucial to the development of CoCoA, together with elaborations and defences of CoCoA and of Chambers’ arguments in support of it. (Material in the other volumes has a clear connection to CoCoA as well.) Within each volume material is presented in chronological order.

As Chambers and Dean concede, the division (or allocation) of material into the five volumes has been “to some extent arbitrary”; and repetition has not been eliminated where the editors deemed it “desirable to indicate the origin or development of some specific theme” [General Preface, Volume I]. For some of the uses referred to above a strict chronological ordering may have been slightly more convenient but the categorization employed does not cause any great difficulty. Nor does the non-numbering of Prefaces and Contents pages. Nor is it a serious reflection on these volumes that for some of the uses discussed above a reader may judge it necessary to look at the body of Chambers’ work which has been omitted. (See Abacus [1982, pp. 185-201] for a bibliography up to 1982. An updated bibliography would have been a welcome addition. Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behaviour and Securities and Obscurities, arguably Chambers’ major books, are crucial complements to these volumes.) Another concern, perhaps trivial, arises from the corrections made in original sources. For many purposes it may well be preferable to have an error-free text — indeed to quibble about the elimination of errors might seem like bizarre behaviour to some; but a historian may well wonder about the impact of the errors in the original text. (I am grateful to Graeme Dean for this point!)

The lack of a detailed index is undoubtedly a serious deficiency. Anyone wishing to (say) study the impact of Karl Popper on Chambers’ work would literally have to check the footnotes or reference list of every item included in all five volumes to ensure that no reference to Popper had been missed. Anyone who wished to study Chambers’ views on (say) “financial position” would have an even harder time.

Nevertheless, Garland is to be commended for making these volumes possible. Apart from the uses referred to above they can assist those who wish to teach a course on the history of accounting thought, or a course which covers CoCoA, or a course in which it is considered desirable to expose students to arguments to the effect that, as far as accounting goes, we do not necessarily live in the best of all possible worlds.

REFERENCES

Anonymous, “A Bibliography of Raymond J. Chambers,” Abacus (December
1982), pp. 185-201. Chambers, R. J., Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behavior (Prentice Hall,
1966).
, Securities and Obscurities (Gower Press, 1973). Reprint edition
re-titled Accounting in Disarray (Garland Publishing, 1982). Chua, W. F., “Radical Developments in Accounting Thought,” Accounting
Review (October 1986), pp. 601-632. Lee, T. A., “The Search for Correspondence with Economic Reality: A Review
Article,” Journal of Accountancy and Business Research (1987), pp. 43-46. Whittington, G., Book Review of Chambers on Accounting, Accounting Review
(July 1987), pp. 842-843.