Reviewed by Richard K. Fleischman John Carroll University

Stephen Walker has undertaken an extensive study of the Society of Accountants in Edinburgh (SAE), the earliest prominent Scottish society to promote and maintain the standing of chartered accountancy as a profession, during its inaugural sixty years. Walker compiled a data base of 1146 SAE members and prospective members who failed to qualify, 1854-1914. Having scoured a variety of primary sources, the author has tabulated and presented this biographical information in numerous interesting ways. The inclusion of ninety-four tables and fifteen illustrations, mostly graphical, bears testimony to the extent of his analysis. The author achieves an excellent mesh of narrative with these statistical compilations while focusing on a number of dominant issues from early SAE history. Major themes include the changing nature of accounting practice over time (from a preponderance of bankruptcy work to company auditing); factors involved in recruiting accountants into the profession (class, residential, educational); the evolution of an examination system to quality new professionals; and the impact of social class origins on recruitment, apprenticeship, and certification.

The organization of this mass of statistical data is an out-standing feature of this book. It reads much like the econometric history inaugurated almost twenty years ago with Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross [1974]. Most innovative was the demographic model that Walker constructed to test the hypothesis that the early membership of the SAE could generate sufficient progeny for a self-recruiting profession. However, Walker employed celibacy, age of marriage, and fertility data to demonstrate that only limited numbers of later SAE members followed in their fathers’ footsteps. The author might have tried to do more with mortality, particularly survival rates of SAE children in an era when life expectancy was still precarious in younger age categories. Likewise, the author’s utilization of mean ages of marriage and death was not the best statistic for smallish samples where several outliers could produce distortions.

Another statistical feature of the analysis was the attempt to link entry into the profession with the occupational background of the families of prospective members. This social standing was demonstrated to be a leading career-choice determinant. The author also divides family origins into nine “social status groups,” which became the basis for SSG-specific fertility rates, indenture exemptions, examination failures, and other comparisons.

The statistical tables so prominent in this work are most imaginative with regard to subject matter and well-designed in their presentation. However, several compilations seemed a bit far afield. For example, the spatial distance between SAE members with no apparent accounting origins and CAs over a continuum of house addresses [p. 103] has some antiquarian interest, but added little to the recruitment analysis. The same might be said of tables linking non-qualification to place of residency during indenture

[pp. 184-185] and numerous comparisons reflecting a preoccupation with similar developments in the legal profession. The author might have been more consistent in revealing the sources for his statistical tables.

Walker, throughout the book, makes judgments about the significance or non-significance of explanatory variables, i.e., apprenticeship firm size and examination pass rates, paternal social status and qualification, and residential/spatial factors in SAE recruitment. While the data are perhaps too qualitative to permit regression analysis, the author might have discussed the potentialities, or lack thereof, for more mathematical determinations of significance.

While this history does provide extensive coverage of this vital professional organization, more background material would have embellished the important historical context of the SAE. What unique circumstances existed in Edinburgh in the mid-nineteenth century to explain these developments? What contributions did the SAE make to the evolution of other professional accounting societies in Scotland and England? What was the quality of life for Edinburgh’s accounting community before and after the formation of the SAE?
The only omission of consequence regarding SAE events was a shortage of information about its social and political activities. It may have been that the organization did little at its meetings, but it seemed the SAE minutes were underutilized. The appendix contained many interesting documents gleaned from this source. The reprinting of an actual examination, as distinct from the several lists of topics contained, would have been interesting.

On balance, Walker’s effort is excellent and valuable for what it does achieve. The book is highly readable, mechanically clean, and attractively published. The interface between narrative text and well-designed statistical tables is worthy of remention. The Society of Accountants in Edinburgh has now been deeply and imaginatively researched. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the early history of the accounting profession in Scotland.

REFERENCE

Fogel, R.W. and Engerman, S.L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.