DOCTORAL RESEARCH
MAUREEN H. BERRY, EDITOR
University of Illinois
S. Paul Garner: A Study of Selected Contributions to the Accounting Profession (The University of Arkansas, 1986) by Robert Michael Garner.
A tall, soft-spoken man, endowed with the courtesy and personal warmth characteristic of a Southern heritage, has in a quiet way become one of the most influential and respected educators of our time. The author of this study of Samuel Paul Garner, only coincidentally bearing the same surname as his subject, has made a valient and commendable effort to sift out from a very rich data base some of Garner’s main achievements during more than half a century of professional and public service. What emerges is a vivid image of Dean Garner as representing something rare in the increasingly segmented and specialized world of accountancy: a generalist who has used his special skills to perceive anomalies, assess their significance for the accounting domain and its environment, and influence the initiation of new ideas from an integrated systems perspective.
This talent for synthesis draws on two of Dean Garner’s main strengths. One has to do with his considerable interpersonal abilities and enthusiastic and vigorous support of causes he champions. The other, his technical expertise in such diverse areas of accounting as auditing, financial, international, managerial, and public sector. This breadth of knowledge is threaded through with a deep sense of history, providing the linkages essential for broad appreciation of situations meriting attention.
As rationale for the dissertation, the author relies on the well accepted premise that much can be learned about the evolution of ideas and ways of doing things by recognizing the roles played by key individuals in certain transformation processes. This assumption is fully justified in the light of what we learn of Garner as a person and a major path-breaker. Another positive feature of this study, regrettably lacking in much historical investigation, is its disclosure of methodology. We are given enough information to be able to construct a model, such as the one shown below,1 of the underlying research framework.
1Adapted from John W. Buckley et al, Research Methodology & Business Decisions, A monograph prepared for the National Association of Accountants and The Society of Industrial Accountants of Canada, 1975, p. 15.
RESEARCH TECHNIQUES MODE STRATEGY DOMAIN FORMAL INFORMAL
(Nature of data and acquisition process) (Data source and environment) (Objective) (Subjective)
Inductive (theory generating Opinion Individual Interviews and correspondence
Primary Content Analysis Scanning
Deductive (theory testing) Archival Secondary Sampling Scanning
In generating and testing theories, the author used two main strategies. One was to solicit opinions from individuals, either the subject himself or those personally acquainted with him or with particular items of interest, using informal techniques which included interviews, telephone conversations, or correspondence. The other research strategy was archival, drawing from primary and secondary data sources and employing both formal and informal techniques. Content analysis and scanning were used in examining original documents, such as unpublished papers and correspondence, lecture notes, and minutes of meetings. Sampling and scanning techniques were applied to secondary sources. These consisted of published materials and other documents which provided the historical and environmental setting and helped to identify and illuminate the events which Dean Garner was most influential in shaping.
Four chapters of the dissertation describe in turn Dean Garner’s main contributions to accounting and business education, the American Accounting Association and the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and other organizations connected with the accounting profession, and the international world of accounting, business, and business education. First, however, there is an introductory section in which we learn about Garner’s early life in Yadkinville, North Carolina, where he rode his pony to his first school in a converted log cabin. After graduating from high school in 1927, he worked in his father’s taxi business in Winston-Salem for a year to help finance his education at Duke University. He graduated in economics in 1932 and began his life-long love of travel by investing his savings in a guided tour of Europe. He then returned to Duke and earned a Master of Arts degree in economics in May 1934. In the following August he married Ruth Bailey.
The Garners spent two years at Mississippi A & M in Starkville, then moved to the University of Texas in Austin in the summer of 1937 when Garner entered the doctoral program. He earned the PhD degree in 1940 and his dissertation was eventually published in 1954 as Evolution of Cost Accounting to 1925. It was reprinted in 1976. The Garners set up their permanent home in Tuscaloosa in 1939 when Garner was appointed as associate professor at the University of Alabama. His promotion to full professor came in 1943, he became Head of the Department of Accounting in 1949, and in 1954 he was named Dean of the School of Commerce and Business Administration. He became Dean Emeritus in 1971.
Grouping Dean Garner’s broad array of achievements into four rather discrete spheres of influence works well as an organizing strategy. In the area of accounting and business education, publications are prominent so considerable attention is given to books and articles which have appeared in about fifty domestic and foreign journals. His internationalization of the program at Alabama, position on the five-year professional accounting degree, and his involvement in the founding and promoting of the Academy of Accounting Historians are also featured. Social concerns also were brought forward in describ-ing Garner’s involvement with two organizations: the National Council for Small Business Management Development and the Lamar Society. Throught the first of these two, he has provided advice on a variety of topics to many small firms in the state of Alabama and throughout the southeast region of the country. The second is a group which tries to deal with various concerns in Southern society by facilitating dialogue, particularly with respect to improving education, across a broad range of beliefs.
Dean Garner has served in the American Accounting Association as a member of the executive committee, as vice president, and in 1951 as president. One of his most notable achievements as president was establishing and encouraging regional sections or groups within the association’s national structure. Another of his pioneering efforts, when chairman of the International Accounting Committee in 1966, was the issuance of a pamphlet which dealt with the internationalization of the accounting curriculum. In the following year, 1966/1967, he was chairman of the Committee on International Relations which looked into ways of expanding a program for the exchange of professors and research scholars. These are just three selected examples of ideas which have become institutionalized. Of significant help in gaining wider acceptance of innovations was Garner’s long tenure in the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business which he presided over in 1964. The plans he developed during that year for improving, unifying, and coordinating business education in the United States eventually became major elements of the Association’s activities.
Garner also influenced educational programs through his various consulting engagements. One of them involved provid-ing advice to the General Accounting Office on training programs to implement audit techniques congruent with the new concepts of operational auditing in government. This experience made him more aware of the need to strengthen and reorient accounting education and he urged these ideas in a letter sent nationwide to business school deans. He also served as an advisor on graduate education to the U.S. Office of Education from 1965 to 1970.
Dean Garner’s international interests cut across each section of the dissertation. Perhaps his most signal effort is the program in International Business Administration (IBA) which he started at the University of Alabama in 1954. A main goal of this pro-gram is to help students prepare themselves to serve the best interests of the world community. Faculty members can take advantage of opportunities to serve as exchange professors and foreign educators have come in to teach at Alabama. Garner’s commitment to international business was recognized by President Nixon who commissioned him as a member of the Regional Export-Import Council from 1969-1974. National rec-ognition was also accorded by the U.S. Department of State which sent Dean Garner on a four-month special assignment to twenty-three countries to collect information about university education for careers in business.
Lasting contributions to the public accounting profession came with Garner’s first assignment to committee work with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in 1953. The particular committee assignment was to design educational courses to keep members aware of current events and thereby improve professional practice. Dean Garner designed and taught the first course in what is now known as continuing professional education in 1954. From 1956 to 1958, he served on the Certified Public Accountant Examination committee which looked into a number of issues connected with the purpose, content, style, and length of the examination as well as the knowledge level contemplated. Because of the gearing of the accounting curricula in many business schools towards CPA examination preparation, this was a critically important committee assignment for Garner as a business school dean.
Most recently, Dean Garner has been devoting much of his energy to the International Association for Accounting Education and Research which was founded in 1984 with Garner as its first president. This Association which is independent of the American Accounting Association, but shares many of the goals of the AAA’s international section, is supporting the Japanese Accounting Association in sponsoring the 1987 World Congress on accounting education in Kyoto. Some of us who received programs from Dean Garner, encouraging us to look at this opportunity to participate in the Congress as an investment, thought about his vitality and powers of persuasion as we mailed off the forms to Japan. Where will he lead us next
