ON THE PRESENT AND FUTURE IMPORTANCE OF ACCOUNTING HISTORY

Wichita State University Accounting Research Seminar

Abstract: A report of a survey on the present and expected importance of ac-counting history to practicing accountants and accounting educators. The survey appears to indicate that accounting history is, and perhaps will continue to be, a topic of special interest to us—accounting historians.

Accounting historians are only too familiar with the lack of awareness of many accounting practitioners about the study of the history of our discipline. This situation seems generally to persist until practitioners near retirement, when it is almost too late for them to benefit fully from the contributions such a study can make to personal professional understanding and judgment.

Is the interest level among practitioners as low as it seems? The answer, according to a survey recently completed, is: unfortunately yes—and it’s not much better among accounting educators!

The survey included public, corporate, and government accountants in entry-level (under five years experience) and senior-level (over ten years experience) positions, plus accounting educators. Questionnaires were distributed by mail to accountants selected randomly from membership lists of professional organizations, and in batches for distribution in offices of ten accounting firms and in several federal agencies. A total of 577 usable responses were received; the overall response rate was 43%.

Respondents were asked to indicate the importance of fifty-seven skill and knowledge areas, including “history of accounting,” using a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 indicating “the highest degree of importance” and 1 indicating “no importance or a lack of familiarity.” Only the results for history of accounting are reported here. Mean responses were calculated by weighting each response by its scale value.

*Professor Ralph Estes, Leonard Cumley, Dirk Durant, Grace Ebong, Dorothy Hentzen, Mary Herrin, Fred Hilger, Philip Jacobs, Herbert Klaskin, Lawrence Low, Arturo Macias, Carl Nord, Allen Norris, John Patterson, Coleen Siegel, and Leo Waner. A copy of the complete study may be obtained from Prof. Estes, Box 87, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas 67208.

Table 1 RATINGS OF THE IMPORTANCE OF ACCOUNTING HISTORY

		Present			Future	
	n	st.dev.	mean	n	st.dev.	mean
Public seniors	66	1.052	2.000	66	1.116	1.985
Public juniors	88	0.949	1.864	88	0.992	1.932
Corp. seniors	111	1.077	1.856	111	1.111	1.829
Corp. juniors	60	1.066	1.683	61	1.131	1.770
Govt. seniors	88	1.154	1.977	87	1.267	2.103
Govt. juniors	71	0.969	1.507	72	0.888	1.500
Educators	86	1.045	2.035	86	1.079	2.151
All respondents	570	1.043	1.858	571	1.086	1.905

Table 1 presents these mean responses for the subject area “history of accounting,” along with the number of responses and standard deviation for each group. The highest ratings for both present and future importance are given by accounting educators, public seniors, and government seniors; these results lend some support to the observation cited above that accountants become more sensitive to the importance of accounting history as they reach senior levels in their careers, perhaps nearing retirement and able to view their profession from a “stateman’s” perspective.

All possible pairs of means in Table 1 were compared for statistically significant differences (using a 5% level of significance), with the following results.
The ratings by government seniors and by public juniors are significantly higher than those by government juniors for both the present and the future.
Accounting educators expect accounting history to be significantly more important in ten years than it is today; this future rating by educators is also significantly greater than the future ratings by government and corporate juniors.

None of the other differences between pairs of means are significant at the 5% level of significance.

These results tend to confirm the suspicion that accounting history is not considered to be important by accounting practitioners in their work. The ratings by accounting educators, as might be expected, are somewhat better, but even educators are inclined to assign a rather low rating. Future projections indicate only a very modest growth in importance.

Now, what practitioners believe is or will be important in their work may differ entirely from what could most effectively be used if they possessed adequate knowledge and skill. We should, of course, be cautious in discounting these results and stubbornly maintaining that accounting history is important even if the practitioner doesn’t realize it. Nevertheless, the accounting practitioner, like the professional in any field, is largely a product of his or her own education, and unquestionably many accountants have had little or no exposure to the study of accounting history.

Thus these results may be interpreted to indicate that little attention should be given to accounting history in the curriculum, be-cause it is of little practical value to the practicing accountant. But they may also be taken as evidence that considerably more attention to accounting history is warranted, to provide the accountant with knowledge that is useful and important but that is now generally lacking among practitioners. Some would find support for this latter view in considering the discipline of calculus. Recent studies and treatises on accounting education such as Roy and MacNeill’s Horizons for a Profession have advocated increased attention to mathematics and to calculus in particular; and yet practitioners in our survey generally assigned very little importance to calculus. Although they expect calculus to be more important than accounting history in the future, for the present calculus was rated behind accounting history with an overall mean rating of only 1.716 compared to 1.858 for accounting history.

Is accounting history an esoteric subject of interest to only a small coterie of devotees, or should it be studied by every aspiring accountant? Our results fail to provide the answer, but they do clearly highlight the question.

But our results do permit one safe assertion. Lord Acton said, “Praise is the shipwreck of historians.” In this regard, it would appear that accounting historians are in for smooth sailing.