Accounting academic elites

Description
This paper reveals that ARIA’s early members failed to protect and advance their specialist
knowledge base—normative theorisation—and their elite position within the scholastic
social order. In the social space occupied by these leading normative theorists, strategic
errors included the absence of effective strategies to protect ARIA’s reputational system
through ‘‘reproduction of the corps’’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 84) and to defend themselves
against empiricists-cum-positivists’ commitment to revolutionise the academy’s research
agenda. The history of ARIA also reveals a fatal inability to create a system of shared dispositions
and cognitive structures amongst its early members capable of resisting the propensity
towards the ‘‘circulation of elites’’ (Pareto, 1935). The irony of the tale is that, in
failing to recognise fully the implications of the empirical revolution in US academic
accounting, ARIA recruited the very individuals whose choice of degree school and scholarly
pursuits labelled them as academics committed to superseding within the academy
the type of scholarship and values that the early members espoused.

Accounting academic elites: The tale of ARIA
John Richard Edwards
a,?
, Graeme Dean
b
, Frank Clarke
b,c
, Peter Wolnizer
b
a
Cardiff Business School, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF10 3EU, Wales, UK
b
The University of Sydney Business School, The University of Sydney, Building H69, NSW 2006, Australia
c
Faculty of Business and Law, University of Newcastle, NSW 2308, Australia
a b s t r a c t
‘‘Golden age’’ accounting theorists Robert Sterling, George Staubus, Yuji Ijiri and Arthur
Thomas joined together to create an elite organisation, the Accounting Researchers Inter-
national Association (ARIA) in 1974, with its chief instigator Robert ‘‘Bob’’ Sterling serving
as its ?rst President. Written correspondence between the early members, in conjunction
with oral testimony, suggest that ARIA’s formation was motivated by a desire to protect
and advance normative-based research. The early members also shared a mutual zeal for
intellectual progress and a common passion to rid accounting practices of its defects. They
shared a conviction that bringing together a well-recognised, dedicated group of scholars
would create an environment in which individual differences would wilt under the pres-
sure of scholarship.
This paper reveals that ARIA’s early members failed to protect and advance their special-
ist knowledge base—normative theorisation—and their elite position within the scholastic
social order. In the social space occupied by these leading normative theorists, strategic
errors included the absence of effective strategies to protect ARIA’s reputational system
through ‘‘reproduction of the corps’’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 84) and to defend themselves
against empiricists-cum-positivists’ commitment to revolutionise the academy’s research
agenda. The history of ARIA also reveals a fatal inability to create a system of shared dis-
positions and cognitive structures amongst its early members capable of resisting the pro-
pensity towards the ‘‘circulation of elites’’ (Pareto, 1935). The irony of the tale is that, in
failing to recognise fully the implications of the empirical revolution in US academic
accounting, ARIA recruited the very individuals whose choice of degree school and schol-
arly pursuits labelled them as academics committed to superseding within the academy
the type of scholarship and values that the early members espoused.
Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Given that accounting is an applied discipline, a natural
priority of accounting thinkers is to contribute towards the
improvement of accounting practice. One might hypothe-
sise that recommendations for reform are likely to have
the greatest potential for gaining acceptance from regula-
tors and achieving success in the market place when pred-
icated upon collaborative work between academics who
engage with different research paradigms. But academic
endeavour is not always as collegial as one might expect,
or hope. The history of accounting thought reveals serious
disagreements between thinkers committed both to differ-
ent research approaches and to the same method of
inquiry.
This work contributes to our understanding of debates
about the competing priorities of accounting thinkers dur-
ing the life-cycle of ARIA, 1974–1993—a research group
created by a desire to improve the quality of accounting
information and its usefulness for informing and guiding
?nancial decision making. ARIA began with four Fellows
among whom the inaugural President, Robert ‘‘Bob’’ Ster-
0361-3682/$ - see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2013.07.001
?
Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 (0)29 20 876658; fax: +44 (0)29 20
874419.
E-mail address: [email protected] (J.R. Edwards).
Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
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j our nal homepage: www. el sevi er. com/ l ocat e/ aos
ling (Table 1) was also the Association’s instigator. Staubus
had this to say to the authors: ‘‘it should be clear that there
were not really four founding members; there was only
one. The organization was clearly Bob’s baby’’ (Staubus,
2011b).
1
While the founder and early recruits
2
were by no means
entirely united in their respective ‘‘solutions’’ to the demon-
strable technical ?aws of conventional ?nancial reporting,
they all sought to improve its quality and usefulness based
on normative thinking informed by observations concerning
the interconnection between accounting and commerce.
From their writings, it is apparent that each sought a ‘‘bet-
ter’’ accounting. As Staubus (2011c) put it: ‘‘We were hoping
to work out our differences and make serious progress to-
wards the ultimate good theory of ?nancial accounting’’.
The history of ARIA reveals that the determination to pro-
mote normative study became overwhelmed by the move-
ment (referred to as a ‘‘revolution’’ by some, including
Beaver, 1989) towards empirical accounting research that
began in the 1960s, and the subsequent positivists’
agency-information research programme.
This study is based primarily on the content of the R.J.
Chambers Archive then available in both hard copy and
electronically at the University of Sydney Business School.
3
The archive comprises more than 15,000 items,
4
and the rel-
evant documentation for the purpose of this study—over 100
letters and attachments—was identi?ed using the Boolean
search facility.
5
Relevant correspondence has been aug-
mented by oral and written observations from ARIA’s surviv-
ing early members including two of its Secretary-Treasurers.
The email correspondence cited in this paper is that with
Staubus (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) and Zeff (2011). Our inter-
pretation of ARIA’s documented history has also bene?tted
from communications with Ijiri, Thomas, Chambers and
Sterling. Much of this correspondence arose in response to
requests made by the authors for early members’ recollec-
tions of the purpose of ARIA.
6
These early members include
the normative theorists who dominated the constituency of
ARIA prior to the admission of those with primarily an
empiricist-cum-positivist perspective, starting with the ana-
lytical thinker Joel Demski in November 1975 (Table 2).
There are concerns that the high status enjoyed by a
particular type of research practitioner has potentially
harmful consequences which include the risk that it might
constrain or crowd out the development of new knowledge
(e.g. Reiter & Williams, 2002). These are not issues of pri-
mary concern in this paper. Nor is this paper interested
in assessing the relative merits of different research para-
digms or considering whether ‘‘the presence of an aca-
demic élite is a consequence of a deliberate strategy or
planning by speci?c individuals or institutions’’ (Lee,
1997, p. 13). The study is nevertheless predicated upon
the generally accepted proposition that academic commu-
nities are strati?ed, hierarchical, and elitist (Bourdieu,
1988), and it aims to improve our understanding of intra-
professional competition within the accounting academy
during the second half of the twentieth century based on
the known history of ARIA.
The second half of the twentieth century saw move-
ments in dominant currents of accounting thought starting
from the ‘‘inductive empirical’’ approach (Whittington,
1986, p. 6) that had held sway since the early development
of a theoretical literature, through the ‘‘golden age’’ of
deductive reasoning (Gaf?kin, 1988) to the positive
accounting research programme which Chua (1996, p.
129) terms the ‘‘empirical/calculative tradition’’. The end
of the period witnessed expanding study of the social
and organisational dimensions of knowledge production
within the accounting domain. The role of ARIA within this
ever-changing theoretical landscape is studied based on
the concept and ideology of the dominant elite that Gid-
dens (1974, p. xiii) describes as ‘‘a cohesive power-wield-
ing group, which is consistently able to sway others to its
opinions’’. The present study attributes ARIA’s failure to re-
sist the ‘‘circulation of elites’’ (Pareto, 1935), and the con-
sequent loss of in?uence and status on the part of
normative researchers, to the Association’s inability to for-
mulate and pursue agreed aims and strategies in a co-ordi-
nated manner. As one of the early members observed
towards the end of ARIA’s life-cycle, there was ‘‘no unifying
spirit’’ (#7361).
The prior accounting literature has not engaged heavily
with elites as a theoretical concept.
7
The term ‘‘elite’’ is of
course widely used in the literature to qualify references
to accountants and accounting institutions, as a synonym
for the word professional, and as a signal of high status with-
in the social order, but little attention has been given to
ways in which it may be exploited, as a concept, to enrich
our understanding of social strati?cation within the
accounting occupational group. The next section supplies a
theoretical perspective to better understand the story of
Table 1
Of?cers of ARIA. Sources: #5965, #6712, #6733, #6851, #7538, #7545,
#7553, #7554, #7566, #7583, #7590, #7591, #7592, #7596.
President Date Secretary Date
Robert R. Sterling 1974–1978 Stephen Zeff 1977–1981
Yuji Ijiri 1979–1980 George Staubus 1982–1983
David Solomons 1981–1982 Ross Skinner 1984–1985
Thomas Dyckman 1983–1984 Nils Hakansson 1986–1987
Robert Kaplan 1985–1986 Baruch Lev 1988–1989
William Cooper 1987–1988 George Foster 1989–1990
Robert Sprouse 1989–1990 Stephen Zeff 1990–1991
Joel Demski 1991–1992 Shyam Sunder 1992–1993
1
Chambers con?rms this assessment in a letter to Sterling dated 8
August 1977 (#7541).
2
The Fellows of ARIA together with their dates of admission and
academic or other af?liation at the time of admission are set out in Table 2.
3
Early surviving members of ARIA were contacted, none of whom had
retained records of its operations.
4
These are classi?ed using the pre?x USA P202, with each document
allocated a unique number preceded by the # sign as used for identi?cation
purposes in this paper.
5
The archive has since been transferred to the University of Sydney
Archives and will be available electronically (from late-2013) at: http://
sydney.edu.au/arms/archives/personal.shtml#Ch.
6
On several occasions Chambers and Sterling made incidental references
to ARIA during conversations with one of the authors (Wolnizer) who also
spoke to Sterling informally, but speci?cally, about ARIA’s purpose just
prior to his death.
7
Exceptions include Lee, 1995, 1997, 1999; Lukka & Kasanen, 1996.
366 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
ARIA drawing on the idea of elites and, in particular, the
work of Pareto and Bourdieu.
Elites
The concept of elites is judged particularly useful ‘‘in
clarifying major features of industrial society’’ which can-
not adequately be analysed using only notions such as rul-
ing class, castes and aristocracies (Keller, 1963, p. 5). Much
of the study of elites is associated with politics and busi-
ness (Mills, 1956), but the concept contributes to under-
standing the social order within any sector of society
(Scott, 1990). The ‘‘founding father’’ of political sociology
and elite theory, Vilfredo Pareto (Bellamy, 2007, p. 128), of-
fers the following de?nition: ‘‘Let us assume that in every
branch of human activity each individual is given an index
which stands as a sign of his capacity . . . So let us make a
class of the people who have the highest indices in their
branch of activity, and to that class give the name of élite’’
(Pareto, 1935,
8
p. 1422, 1423).
9
The concept of elites there-
fore recognises social strati?cation within an occupational
group (Janowitz, 1956) and exists as a collective ‘‘enjoying
a position of pre-eminence above all others’’ (Nadel, 1956,
p. 415). It enjoys that status because it possesses some kind
of attribute that causes those ‘‘others’’ to recognise its prac-
titioners as superior (Nadel, 1956). Its existence also implies
an ability to exercise ‘‘in?uence or (loosely speaking) power’’
(Nadel, 1956, p. 417; see also Janowitz, 1956, p. 44) though
not necessarily to do so in an overtly coercive manner. The
elite is highly respected and, for that reason, ‘‘considered
worth following’’ (Nadel, 1956, p. 417).
Academic elites
Elite status therefore exists whenever a coherent and
identi?able group possesses a distinctive and valuable
attribute that enables it to claim a privileged position with-
in society. In academe, the valuable attribute is intellect
combined with specialist knowledge. The term elite does
not imply a pejorative interpretation, but it does signify
the possession of power which may be wielded both posi-
tively and negatively. The existence of a strati?ed hierar-
chy of elite institutions and elite individuals within a
social arena has been theorised by Pierre Bourdieu
(1988). Based on a case-study of the French education sys-
tem of the 1960s, Bourdieu (1988) posits that academic
elites maintain their position and power by protecting
the ‘‘cultural capital’’ created by academic success. In an
earlier work Bourdieu (1984) highlighted the concept of
‘‘academic capital’’ which both affects and is affected by
Table 2
Membership of ARIA. Sources: Various.
Fellow Date
a
Af?liation
b
Robert R. Sterling Founder Rice University, USA
Yuji Ijiri March 1974 Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
George J. Staubus March 1974 University of California, Berkeley, USA
Arthur L. Thomas March 1974 University of Kansas, USA
Raymond J. Chambers September 1974 University of Sydney, Australia
Maurice Moonitz October 1974 University of California, Berkeley, USA
David Solomons February 1975 University of Pennsylvania, USA
Carl Devine
c
February 1975 Florida State University, USA
Stephen A. Zeff February 1975 Tulane University, New Orleans, USA
Joel S. Demski November 1975 Stanford University, USA
Thomas R. Dyckman January 1976 Cornell University, USA
Ross M. Skinner December 1976 Partner, Clarkson, Gordon & Co., Canada
William W. Cooper December 1976 Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
William H. Beaver July 1977 Stanford University, USA
Sidney Davidson February 1978 University of Chicago, USA
Robert S. Kaplan February 1978 Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
Nils H. Hakansson August 1980 University of California, Berkeley, USA
Robert Sprouse October 1982 Financial Accounting Standards Board, USA
Baruch Lev September 1984 Tel Aviv University, Israel
George J. Foster September 1985 Stanford University, USA
Mark A. Wolfson September 1986 Stanford University, USA
William Kinney September 1987 University of Texas, USA
Raymond J. Ball September 1988 University of Rochester, USA
Shyam V. Sunder By 1991 Carnegie-Mellon University, USA
James A. Ohlson By February 1992 Columbia University, New York
Emeritus fellow
William A. Paton October 1974 University of Michigan, USA
William J. Vatter October 1974 University of California, Berkeley, USA
William T. Baxter February 1975 London School of Economics, England
a
Date is when membership ?rst indicated in Chambers Archive.
b
The af?liations given are those that applied on the date of election to ARIA, so far as this can be ascertained.
c
Had transferred to Emeritus Fellow status by October 1981 (#3/7557).
8
Edited by Arthur Livingston and translated from the original (Trattato di
sociologia generale, 1916) by Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston.
9
Pareto’s idea that variations in inherent ability led to elites developed
out of his econometric analysis of normal curves of distribution. It has been
suggested that the application of these ideas to help explain the social order
owes a debt to the work of another Italian, Gaetano Mosca, who was the
?rst to make a systematic distinction between elites and masses (Botto-
more, 1964, pp. 2–3).
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 367
cultural capital. For example, the possession of academic
capital in the form of, say, a university education provides
access to cultural capital by improving the graduate’s sta-
tus in society.
Studies have shown how the established elite within
the accounting academy can exercise power to control
the production of what is de?ned as legitimate knowledge
(Lee, 1999). Indeed, within the academy, it has been sug-
gested that ‘‘Perhaps more than in other ?elds, a small elite
enjoys substantial authority over what constitutes valid
accounting knowledge’’ (Fogarty, 2011, p. 32). Relevant
here is Bourdieu’s (1988, p. 84, emphasis added) judge-
ment that ‘‘Academic capital is obtained and maintained
by holding a position enabling domination of other posi-
tions and their holders’’. This primacy has to be fought
for and protected. The academic accounting community
therefore exists within a de?ned social space—a ?eld—
which, from a Bourdieusian perspective is:
an arena of struggle through which agents and institu-
tions seek to preserve or overturn the existing distribu-
tion of capital (manifested, in the scienti?c ?eld, by the
ranking of institutions, disciplines, theories, methods,
topics, journals, prizes and so on): it is a battle?eld
wherein the bases of identity and hierarchy are end-
lessly disputed over (Wacquant, 2008, p. 222).
The existence of elite groups within a ?eld of knowl-
edge is a given and, at the start of the 1970s, the early
members of ARIA were undoubtedly among the leaders
of the accounting academy. At any point in time the spe-
cialist knowledge base of the ruling elite is best placed to
continue into the future (Lukka & Kasanen, 1996, p. 770),
but its long-term survival will depend on effective steps
being taken to resist interlopers and to ensure ‘‘reproduc-
tion of the corps’’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 84). Lee (1999, pp.
260–261) summarises the dynamics as follows:
the underlying philosophy of an academic élite is to
regard the creation of a reputation of academic worthi-
ness as the predominant basis for maintaining its dom-
inant position. Such a reputation comes from investing
considerable time in of?ces, rituals, ceremonies, meet-
ings, memberships, awards, honors, and other public
displays of competence. In this sense, academic power
is a function of a game in which there is a desire by
members of the élite to invest in the game and limit
the opportunities of competitors.
The transient character of elite status is next introduced
to help understand the respective failure and success of the
normative and the positive theorists to protect their posi-
tion within the academy.
Circulation of elites
For Pareto, the study of historical change very largely
revolves around the study of elites, and he devised the
phrase ‘‘circulation of elites’’ (Pareto, 1935, chapter 11;
see also Mosca, 1939
10
) to signify an inevitable process
whereby ‘‘one elite is replaced by another’’ (Bottomore,
1964, p. 42). Pareto (1935, p. 1430) famously and graphically
portrayed the inevitable outcome of this dynamic as follows:
‘‘History is a graveyard of aristocracies’’, where aristocracy is
intended as a generic term covering any dominant group.
Nadel (1956, p. 423) explains the demise of an elite more
fully as an ‘‘inability to respond to the ?ow of new ideas
and needs, and hence regression into either stagnation or
vulnerability. In this sense elites do carry within them the
elements of their own decay and transformation’’. But even
though circulation may be inevitable, elites can employ
strategies to protect and prolong their status within the so-
cial order.
According to the political scientist James Hans Meisel
(1958), an elite may be recognised by the possession of
three characteristics: consciousness, coherence and con-
spiracy. Consciousness refers to the awareness of common
interests; the group recognises itself as an elite with the
potential for power. Coherence means that it acts together
to pursue its common interest, while conspiracy indicates
a common will to act collectively to achieve agreed goals
(Nesbitt-Larking, 2007, p. 83). Thus enduring elites are
organised and united and, within academe, have potential
for protecting their position by employing strategies that
include congregation within select academic institutions,
the successful development of doctoral programmes and
control over publication outlets (Lee, 1999; Lee & Williams,
1999; Panozzo, 1997; Qu, Ding, & Lukasewich, 2009; Reiter
& Williams, 2002).
The next section reports the failure of normative theo-
rists to maintain their elite status within the ?eld of aca-
deme. Instead, their social space was successfully overrun
by empiricists-cum-positivists who, in contrast, have pro-
tected and substantially maintained their position in the
social order through to the present day by pursuing suc-
cessful reproduction strategies.
Transforming the social order within the academy
Up until World War 2 much of the effort to improve
external ?nancial reporting practice was based on ‘‘induc-
tive empirical’’ reasoning (Whittington, 1986, p. 6). The
prevailing historical cost model remained sacrosanct and
efforts were directed towards making it function more
effectively. Theoretical concepts were distilled from pre-
vailing best practice and their purpose was to rationalise
and justify how accounting was already being done. There
were voices seeking more fundamental reform of generally
accepted accounting practice; people like Theodore Lim-
perg (The Netherlands), Kenneth MacNeal (US), Martti Saa-
rio (Finland), Eugen Schmalenbach and Fritz Schmidt
(Germany) and Gino Zappa (Italy). Their ideas were coun-
tered at the institutional level by the Paton and Littleton
monograph commissioned by the American Accounting
Association (AAA). An Introduction to Corporate Accounting
Standards (Paton & Littleton, 1940) has been described by
Zeff (1999, pp. 90–91) as ‘‘an elegant explication and ratio-
nalization of the historical cost accounting model’’ which
‘‘probably did as much as any single publication to perpet-
uate the use of historical cost accounting in the U.S.’’.
10
Translated from the original (Elementi di scienza politica, 1896) by H.D.
Kahn.
368 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
Post World War 2 witnessed the rising tide of deductive
reasoning in the endeavour to break out of the straight
jacket of historical cost accounting, with the 1960s wit-
nessing the ‘‘golden age of a priori research in accounting’’
(Nelson, 1973, p. 4). Although adopting a quite different
approach from that of ‘‘inductive empirical’’ thinkers, nor-
mative theorists were equally determined to ?nd ways of
improving accounting practice, and some of them contrib-
uted heavily to institutional endeavours to construct a the-
oretical basis for ?nancial reporting in the United States
(e.g., Moonitz, 1961; Sprouse & Moonitz, 1962).
Even during its ‘‘golden age’’ the primacy of normative
research began to be seriously contested. According to
Lee (1995, p. 249), drawing on Zeff (1989, pp. 170–172),
the nature and content of US business schools’ doctoral
programmes ‘‘changed substantially as a response to criti-
cisms in the 1950s and 1960s of a lack of scienti?cally-
based research’’.
11
Increasing engagement with scienti?c
method was based on the conviction that the knowledge it
creates is ‘‘essentially factual, lawlike and systematic with
no doubts being expressed about its range of application’’
(Panozzo, 1997; Whitley, 1984, p. 369). To help challenge
the existing normative elite, such research was sometimes
lauded by its practitioners as inherently superior to more
qualitative approaches (see, for example, Dopuch & Revsine,
1973; Whittington, 1986, p. 25).
Reviewing developments from the standpoint of the
early twenty-?rst century, Paul F. Williams and his collab-
orators summarise the following radical changes in
accounting methodologies designed to make research
‘‘more ‘scienti?c’’’ (Reiter & Williams, 2002, p. 578): ‘‘Neo-
classical economics-based theories were relied upon
extensively to shift accounting research to its current focus
on capital market theory (monetarist ?nance) and the ef?-
cient market hypothesis’’ (Ravenscroft & Williams, 2009, p.
775). The new type of research was facilitated by develop-
ments in statistical techniques and quantitative analyses
and by the availability of extensive ?nancial accounting
databases and the computer technology needed to develop
and interrogate them (Davidson, in Dyckman & Zeff, 1984,
p. 282; Ravenscroft & Williams, 2009, p. 775). This new
direction for accounting research was encouraged by pow-
erful funding bodies (The Ford Foundation and the Carne-
gie Corporation of New York) who called upon ‘‘business
schools to raise the standards of their educational pro-
grammes and intensify the rigour of their research’’ (Zeff,
1989, p. 169).
Key institutions leading the crusade in search of the sci-
enti?c were the Universities of Chicago and Rochester. At
Chicago, a key institutional initiative (in collaboration with
the London School of Economics) saw the launch of the
Journal of Accounting Research (JAR) in 1963.
12
Its creation
has been attributed to a growing concern among some aca-
demics that the existing elite journal, The Accounting Review
(TAR), ‘‘was not giving suf?cient encouragement to empirical
research (particularly of a hypothesis-testing kind) and the
importation of ideas and methods from related disciplines’’
(Dyckman & Zeff, 1984, p. 231; see also Davidson at p.
282). Although intended to be supportive of empirical work,
JAR initially welcomed papers from authors employing other
research approaches. JAR’s editorial board comprised faculty
from the University of Chicago and the LSE from formation
date through to 1974, except for Chambers’ participation be-
tween 1964 and 1967.
13
The level of LSE involvement
dropped off fairly quickly as JAR forsook ‘‘its earlier interest
in traditional normative and historical research and had be-
gun to devote its space almost exclusively to analytical and
empirical studies’’ (Dyckman & Zeff, 1984, p. 262). Whereas
during the ?rst ?ve years of its existence the normative page
count of JAR out-numbered the empirical, by 1972 60% was
empirical and normative work featured not at all.
14
Concur-
rently TAR gradually became dominated by empirical stud-
ies. This was not, initially, an editorially inspired change of
direction. On retirement as editor in 1983 Zeff complained
that ‘‘questions [often] being addressed in manuscripts seem
to be contrived in order that novel research methods might
be given some exercise. When modeling problems, research-
ers seem to be more affected by technical developments in
the literature than by their potential to explain phenomena’’
(reproduced in Zeff, 1989, p. 170). Privileging explicitly sci-
enti?c methodology was not a concern of subsequent editors
of TAR. When a submission from Chambers criticising ‘‘the
PA cult’’ was rejected, TAR’s editor Rashad Abdel-Khalik
unabashedly described (18 November 1991) the journal’s
policy towards normative theorising as follows:
One does not see articles in The Accounting Review or
Journal of Accounting Research nowadays by Bedford,
Mautz, Sterling, or Ijiri. Not because they do not submit
papers. It is exactly for the same reason [that your paper
has been rejected]: lack of harmony between the paper
and the changing state-of-the-art (#9738).
The development of a more scienti?c approach of
course required ground-breaking research as well as recep-
tive publication outlets. Here, Ball and Brown (1968) is
‘‘viewed as a prominent moment in the scienti?c transfor-
mation of accounting’’ (Reiter & Williams, 2002, p. 582, p.
592). In the same year Beaver (1968) helped form ‘‘the core
of the capital markets paradigm, and spurred a growth
industry in empirical-based accounting research’’ (Brown,
1996, p. 745), while the development of a quarterly earn-
ings forecasting literature is credited to pioneering papers
by Foster (1977) and Grif?n (1977). The University of
Rochester made its major contribution to the rise of scien-
ti?c-based research with the formulation of positive
accounting theory (Watts & Zimmerman, 1978, 1979); an
initiative that has been described as ‘‘an intellectual off-
shoot of the Chicago School of Economics’’ (Mouck, 1992,
11
Normative theorists would ?ercely reject the implication of being non-
scienti?c (Dean & Clarke, 2010) as would some of positive accounting’s
practitioners be equally appalled at the suggestion they rely exclusively on
inductive logic.
12
Concerns that existing journal outlets were inadequate was more
widespread, with Wells’ (2000: 261) account of the foundation of Abacus
(launched 1965) revealing that from around 1963 Chambers sought to
establish an international journal that would inquire into the ‘‘fundamental
features of accounting’’.
13
The University of Sydney had initially been intended as third collab-
orator, as it was felt ‘‘important that JAR be an international journal’’
(Davidson in Dyckman & Zeff, 1984, p. 282; see also pp. 261–262).
14
Derived from Dyckman and Zeff (1984, p. 237, Table 3).
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 369
p. 39). In Tinker and Puxty’s (1995, p. 17) estimation, ‘‘The
Demand for and Supply of Accounting Theories: The Mar-
ket for Excuses’’ (Watts & Zimmerman, 1979)
marks the end of one era and the beginning of another.
It declares the ‘‘normative’’ project of academics like
Abraham Briloff, and other social critics of corporate
accounting practices to be invalid; that there are no
objective grounds in accounting theory for judging
accounting practice as ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’; all such judg-
ments are mere excuses or apologies for advancing
the interests of particular social constituencies, couched
in a language of academic impartiality and objectivity.
Reiter and Williams (2002, p. 576) take up the story of
what Beaver (1989) portrays as ‘‘an accounting
revolution’’:
By the 1980’s, the positive accounting research pro-
gram, based on positive economic theory (Watts and
Zimmerman, 1986), dominated mainstream accounting
research in the USA . . . The in?uence of positive
accounting, which Chua (1996) calls the ‘‘empirical/cal-
culative tradition,’’ has spread beyond North America
and become a major global accounting research mode.
The continued ability of a relatively small number of
faculty members at elite universities to dominate research
publications and journal editing processes in the US is evi-
dence of major obstacles to mounting a challenge to the
ruling elite (Williams & Rodgers, 1995). The elite are not
of course con?ned to faculty of the Universities of Chicago
and Rochester, but it was from those institutions that sci-
enti?c methodologies were disseminated and seized upon
by faculty determined to rise to the top of the academy.
This new elite, dominated by researchers ‘‘dependent on
economics and ?nance-based theories and methodologies’’
(Lee, 1995, p. 258), has proved highly successful in ‘‘pro-
ducing the producers’’ (Macdonald, 1995, p. 189; see also
Larson, 1977, p. 14) through the vibrant and successful
PhD programmes run by the leading business schools. It
is this same elite that controls the principal forum for aca-
demics in the US, the AAA, and dominates the editorial
boards of leading US accounting journals (Chabrak, 2012,
p. 474).
The inability of ARIA to protect the privileged position
once occupied by normative researchers within the acad-
emy and its failure to improve ?nancial reporting practices
through collaboration between academics from different
research backgrounds is now examined.
ARIA
The elitist characteristic of ARIA is forcefully demon-
strated by an emphasis on top quality research and, as
the next section of this paper reveals, restrictions
imposed on admission based on the approval of nomina-
tions by almost the entire cohort of existing Fellows. The
purpose of ARIA was formally set out in bylaws which
appear to have been drafted by the incoming Secretary-
Treasurer towards the end of 1976 (#7533). These were
probably based on discussions at the Atlanta meeting
the previous August, with Article II stating: ‘‘The purpose
shall be to encourage and recognize scholarly research in
accounting’’ (#7533). Its ‘‘organised activities’’ were to
consist of committees, publications, forums and confer-
ences (Article VIII), i.e., the kinds of activity which, if
successful, would help to achieve ‘‘reproduction of the
corps’’ (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 84). ARIA had implicit objec-
tives which went well beyond the stated desire to
encourage research scholarship. For founder Sterling
and certainly also for Chambers, these were to foster pri-
marily normative research and to in?uence what went
on in the world of accounting.
Sterling was Research Director at the AAA when he
founded ARIA.
15
Evidence of his concern with conven-
tional accounting practices and his belief that research
and practice were diverging at the very time convergence
was urgently required is contained in two contemporary
papers directed at a professional audience (Sterling,
1973a, 1973b) and in his co-authored critique of Gonedes
and Dopuch (Sterling & Harrison, 1974). Concurrently
Chambers (1973, 1974) revealed his hand. Therein he
argued the need to counter the momentum of the empir-
icists-cum-positivists’ ‘‘movement’’ (Chambers, 1974, p.
39) that built on the seminal work of Ball and Brown
(1968), and he attacked the perceived academic domi-
nance of ef?cient markets theory. These outpourings did
not mean that Sterling and Chambers rejected explicitly
empirical work. Indeed, for them, the mere mention of
a normative–positive divide was an anathema. As we
shall see below, it was the quest for synergy through col-
laboration between academics committed to different re-
search paradigms that underpinned the Accounting
Researchers International Association Symposium (the
‘‘Taxi Symposium’’), the decision to hold annual dinners,
and other initiatives which failed to materialise.
Chambers’ (1997, p. xxvii) described the aspirations for
ARIA of his close intellectual colleague Bob Sterling:
In 1974 he launched the Accounting Researchers Inter-
national Association, a small self-elected group of
teachers and researchers. In other ?elds such associa-
tions had served to strengthen the community of inter-
est in the ideals of scholarship and the pursuit of
reliable knowledge. By these means he hoped, it seems,
to replace con?ict and debate with collaborative striv-
ing for excellence.
Correspondence between Chambers and Sterling and
oral discussions between Sterling and one of the current
authors exposes the motivations for such an association
as: (i) to stem the tide of empiricism-cum-positivism in
accounting research – a move some perceived as threat-
ening accounting scholarship; and (ii) to defend the
scholarly reputations of those who sought to advance
accounting as a university discipline in its own right.
What appears to have been a fair degree of consensus
between Sterling and Chambers concerning what ARIA
was about may not have been communicated effectively
15
Details of Sterling’s distinguished career and scholarship are provided
in Chambers (1997), Wolnizer (2010), and Lee and Wolnizer (1997, 2012).
370 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
to other Fellows. George Staubus observed a lack of
clarity in ARIA’s objectives, highlighting several possibil-
ities ‘‘Bob’s personal objective, as mentioned above [to
convince other members of the importance of his work].
Consolidation of our views on one normative theory?
Advance all kinds of accounting research?’’ (Staubus,
2011b).
The inability to identify and pursue clearly de?ned
objectives helps to explain ARIA’s ineffectiveness as a
mechanism for safeguarding normative researchers’ social
space within the academy. But ARIA’s recruitment strate-
gies also lacked ?tness for purpose.
ARIA membership and elitism
From the outset ARIA was an elite association compris-
ing some of the leading ?gures in the accounting academy,
with the criterion for admission described in the letter
from Sterling (25 September 1974) inviting Chambers to
join as ‘‘outstanding research contributions’’ (#7514).
When the Association’s bylaws were drafted in the autumn
of 1976, the entry standard was restated as: ‘‘contributions
to the accounting literature of a scholarly standard’’ (Arti-
cle III, #7533). Revised bylaws in force six years later were
more closely aligned to the condition signalled in the letter
informing Chambers of his election: ‘‘Individuals who . . .
have made outstanding contributions to accounting schol-
arship’’ (Article III, #7558). Sterling also informed Cham-
bers that election was an ‘‘honor requiring an af?rmative
vote of 90% of the current Fellows’’ (#7514). Given the size
of the organisation in 1974, and for some time afterwards,
admission required unanimous support from the member-
ship (#7517).
16
In implementing its recruitment strategy, the leader-
ship of ARIA faced ‘‘the dilemma of exclusiveness versus
market control’’ (Macdonald & Ritzer, 1988, p. 257). ARIA,
although an elite organisation, recognised the need to
move beyond its initially narrow membership base if it
were to wield in?uence within the accounting domain.
However, the strict admission criteria proved a signi?cant
stumbling block. Following his election to membership
Chambers was invited to nominate three further Fellows.
His recommendations were Backer, Moonitz and Zeff
(#7516). Only Moonitz gained immediate admission, with
his name included among the Fellows subsequently (29
October 1974
17
) invited to ballot on seven new nominations
for admission as Fellows and four as Fellows Emeriti
(#7517). Paton and Vatter were elected Fellows Emeriti,
but none of the proposed Fellows proved acceptable to all
six existing members. In expressing doubts concerning the
likely success of any future initiatives designed to expand
the membership, Chambers signalled the high standards ex-
pected from new Fellows: ‘‘Many people are assiduous, but
few have a record of sustained and rigorous development
of an idea or ideas of substance’’ (#7518, December 1974).
Sterling claimed to share Chambers’ disappointment at the
lack of support for recent nominations, but admitted fore-
seeing, at the outset, the dif?culty of attaining a sizeable
membership: ‘‘I talked to several people about who they
thought ought to be Fellows and I was surprised by the
diversity of opinion’’ (#7519). It was also around this time
that Chambers referred to ‘‘ARIA as pretty much a bunch
of prima donnas’’ (#7520). The promising beginning had
arguably stalled within a year.
Numerous ballots conducted in the endeavour to in-
crease the membership continued to founder on the strin-
gency of the admission process—1975 saw the largest
group of new recruits, although they numbered just four.
Solomons, Devine and Zeff were reported as new Fellows
on 21 February, while a leading analytical scholar, Joel
Demski, had been admitted by 25 November (#7526,
#4658). The membership issue continues to feature prom-
inently in correspondence contained in the Chambers Ar-
chive but, despite the adoption of various strategies
designed to make election easier, just 14 further Fellows
were admitted as the result of numerous ballots held over
the next 17 years (Table 2).
During ARIA’s life-cycle, two successful nominees re-
jected the opportunity to enlist. First, in 1983, the Univer-
sity of Chicago’s Nicholas Dopuch, editor or co-editor of JAR
throughout the period 1967–1998, declined an invitation
to join (#6714). Correspondence dated 13 August 1987
draws attention to the fact that Dopuch had been criticised
by Cooper and Zeff ‘‘for his overly narrow approach to
accounting’’. Cooper continues: ‘‘Maybe the breadth repre-
sented by ARIA is what he was reacting to’’ (#7093). In
1993 ARIA membership was offered to Katherine Schipper,
then co-editor of JAR with Nicholas Dopuch. She replied
(#7414):
When you [Beaver] spoke with me about my joining
[ARIA] . . . I said that I would like to discuss the matter
with some people. In light of my discussions, and all
things considered, I believe it is best for me to decline
the invitation to join the group.
Both invitees were faculty of The University of Chicago
which Staubus described as ‘‘the breeding ground of the
empirical research movement.’’ He continues: ‘‘I am con-
vinced that the coolness [towards ARIA] was palpable’’
(Staubus, 2011c). Schipper’s reply is the last record of AR-
IA’s affairs in the Chambers Archive.
The elite status of the Fellows based on publications in
top journals and other signals of institutional recognition
of their standing within the academy is demonstrated in
the next section. It also underscores the Fellows’ elite sta-
tus within the academy by showing that, in terms of insti-
tutional recognition, they signi?cantly out-performed the
unsuccessful nominees.
Signals of elite status
The top accounting journals in the world at the time
ARIA was formed and, therefore, the premier institutional
measure of academic achievement were TAR and JAR.
Table 3 shows that the publication record of the Fellows
in TAR/JAR was phenomenal with the exception of Ross
16
There were two categories of membership: Fellow and Fellow Emeritus.
Only the former category carried the right to vote on nominations (#7517)
and other matters.
17
Often the precise date of a poll is unknown, and the date reported is
that of associated correspondence in the Chambers Archive.
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 371
Skinner. Skinner was a practising accountant with a serious
interest in academic matters,
18
whose admission may be
attributed to the desire on the part of ARIA’s early members
to signal their commitment to the improvement of real
world accounting practices. The average number of publica-
tions of the remainder in those two elite journals at the date
of joining was 10.4 and, repeating the calculation for 2011—
the last year covered by Heck (2011)—produces an average
of 15.8 (each ?gure derived from Table 3). These are stagger-
ing achievements given that most accounting and ?nance
academics, even in the US, are never published in either of
those journals. Indeed, Heck (2009) reveals how dif?cult
and unusual it is to achieve a single publication in what
are judged to be today’s ?ve leading journals.
19
Table 3 reports two further signals of elite status. The
prestigious AAA ‘‘Notable contributions to accounting liter-
ature award’’ (American Accounting Association) has been
made each year since 1966 (1974, 1988 excepted). The Fel-
lows accumulated between them 27 awards
20
(or shared
awards), which is 43.5% of the total awards (62) made to
date—a ?gure which is even more impressive when it is
recognised that the academic career of many of the Fellows
ended long ago. Corresponding ?gures for the period up to
1993—the year of ARIA’s demise—were 23 awards or 56.1%
of the total made to that date. The third measure of elite sta-
tus is induction to the Accounting Hall of Fame established
at Ohio State University in 1950. Its purpose is to honour
‘‘accountants who have made or are making signi?cant con-
tributions to the advancement of accounting since the
beginning of the twentieth century’’ (Fisher College of Busi-
ness). Fifteen (60%) of the Fellows received this accolade
(Table 3).
The fact that the Fellows, as a group, comprised the
crème de la crème is revealed by using these latter two met-
rics to compare their institutional recognition with that of
unsuccessful nominees, all of whom were also leading aca-
demics. Of the 43 known
21
unsuccessful nominees, nine re-
ceived 12 AAA awards between them, re?ecting an average
of 0.3 per person compared with 1.1 for the Fellows. Turning
to Hall of Fame admissions, nine (20.9%) unsuccessful nom-
inees achieved admission
22
compared with 60% in the case
of successful nominees.
To help understand the failure of ARIA to protect the
elite status of normative researchers and perhaps, thereby,
exert a signi?cant in?uence on the history of accounting
research, the next sub-section examines the changing
composition of the membership over time in terms of re-
search orientation. It is argued that a distinction needs to
be drawn between the early members, who broadly shared
Sterling’s aspirations, and those who were later admitted.
As indicated above, early members are de?ned as the
membership prior to the admission of Joel Demski in
November 1975.
Transformation of recruitment strategy
A classi?cation of the research proclivities of ARIA’s Fel-
lows is given in Table 4. Tackling the classi?cation issue
confronts the rudimentary normative/positive or similar
divide. For exposition purposes we have settled on a mod-
i?ed version of that dichotomy as a workable distinction
drawing on the analyses of Mattessich (1996, 2007), Hen-
driksen (1982), Lee (1999) and our own combined assess-
ments. Re?ecting the need for caution when making
these classi?cations, the following conditional terms are
employed to cover the two main categories: primarily nor-
mative and mainly empirical.
The content of Table 4 is ?rst used to analyse votes cast
on the ?rst two occasions for which there exists a record of
voting patterns (see Table 5).
23
The 11 Fellows eligible to
vote in June 1976 comprised seven primarily normative
researchers, one eclectic, one historical and two empiri-
cally-inclined scholars (Table 4).
24
If one accepts Sterling
and Chambers assertion that the role of ARIA was to foster
and provide a degree of protection for normative research,
this weighting of the electorate might explain why an
empirics-oriented researcher such as Abdel-Khalik attracted
just two supporters. But Beaver gets eight votes and, to the
extent one can judge, there is no real sign of normatively-in-
clined researchers being favoured—Bedford, Briloff, Horn-
gren, Mattessich and Skinner were clearly prominent
normative thinkers yet were rejected at the ballot box—
compared with the explicitly empirical. Of course some/all
of the primarily normative candidates might not have scored
well because the existing Fellows did not consider their re-
search to display suf?cient excellence. At the next ballot
for which voting patterns are known (July 1977, Table 5)
there are, again, contradictory signals. Only two empiricists
were nominated for consideration by the Fellowship, but
these comprise thetop vote catcher, Beaver, and Kaplan
who was ranked equal second with Davidson.
The above voting patterns invite the hypothesis that
something other than the advancement of normative re-
search had, by 1976–1977, become the principal criterion
for admission. The idea that admission criteria changed
over time is explored by re-examining Table 3 (publica-
tions in TAR/JAR) in conjunction with the ARIA Fellows’ re-
search proclivities reported in Table 4. The conclusion
reached is that Fellows came to be admitted on the basis
of research excellence per se rather than commitment to
a particular research approach.
18
Skinner’s Accounting principles: A Canadian viewpoint (1972) is credited
with leading to ‘‘the development of a framework for Canadian accounting
standards’’ (Jensen, 2000, p. 149). On induction to the US Accounting Hall of
Fame in 1980, Skinner associated his attempt to ‘‘connect up recognized
accounting standards with a conceptual framework’’ with similar endeav-
ours by Chambers, Sterling and Edwards and Bell, though pointing out that
his reasoning was inductive rather than deductive (Skinner, 2000, p. 152).
19
Of these Accounting, Organizations and Society (launched 1976), Con-
temporary Accounting Research (1984) and Journal of Accounting and
Economics (1979) were not in existence when ARIA was created.
20
Award shared by two Fellows (Ijiri and Kaplan) in 1971 counted as one
award.
21
From 1981, it is likely that the names of nominees with only one
supporter are unknown (#7557). Moreover, there is no record of nomina-
tions made (if any) between 1988 and 1991.
22
Anthony, Bedford, Bell, Burton, Edwards, Feltham, Hopwood, Horngren
and Kohler.
23
Voting patterns are also known for ballots held in February 1978
(#7545), October 1978 (#7550) and April 1979 (#7553).
24
The three ‘‘primarily normative’’ Emeritus Fellows did not of course
possess voting rights.
372 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
If research excellence had always been the principal cri-
terion for admission we might expect that the preponder-
ance of normative researchers among the founders and
early recruits re?ected the fact that normative researchers
out-published empiricists until the latter began to be
admitted at the end of 1975. Using October 1975
25
as a
cut-off date, Table 3 reveals that the publication record of
some of the early members was inferior to that of a number
of empiricists later admitted. For example, of the nine early
members, just three had more than eight publications in TAR
or JAR whereas six subsequently admitted empiricists al-
ready exceeded that threshold. Three of the latter group
(Beaver, Demski, and Kaplan) were on the board of the Chi-
Table 3
Signals of elite status. Source: American Accounting Association; Fisher College of Business; Heck (2011).
Fellows Date
joined
Publications in TAR/JAR AAA award Hall of
Fame
To October
1975
November 1975 to
joining
Post
joining
To
2011
Robert F. Sterling 1974 8 8 1968, 1973 2006
Yuji Ijiri 1974 18 6 24 1966, 1967, 1971,
1976
1989
George J. Staubus 1974 11 2 13
Arthur L. Thomas 1974 7 2 9
Raymond J.
Chambers
1974 12 5 17 1966 1991
Maurice Moonitz 1974 8 1 9 1979
David Solomons 1975 2 2 1969 1992
Carl Devine 1975 5 5 1986
Stephen A. Zeff 1975 8 6 14 2002
Joel S. Demski 1975 17 23 40 1967, 1970 2000
Thomas R. Dyckman 1976 9 8 17 1966, 1978 2009
Ross Skinner 1976 2000
William W. Cooper 1976 8 2 10 1995
William H. Beaver 1977 14 11 25 1968, 1979, 1983 1996
Sidney Davidson 1978 13 3 16 1983
Robert S. Kaplan 1978 10 3 8 21 1971, 1987 2006
Nils H. Hakansson 1980 3 4 3 10
Robert T. Sprouse 1982 5 5 1994
Baruch Lev 1984 10 6 11 27 1994
George Foster 1985 1 6 3 10 1981, 1983
Mark A. Wolfson 1986 8 3 11 1989, 1992
William R. Kinney 1987 9 11 14 34 1985
Raymond J. Ball 1988 4 2 8 14 2009
Shyam V. Sunder 1991 2 11 5 18 1982, 1998
James A. Ohlson 1992 2 12 6 20 1995, 2000
Table 4
Research classi?cation of ARIA Fellows.
Fellow Date joined Classi?cation
Robert R. Sterling Founder Primarily normative
Yuji Ijiri March 1974 Primarily normative
George J. Staubus March 1974 Eclectic
Arthur L. Thomas March 1974 Primarily normative
Raymond A. Chambers September 1974 Primarily normative
Maurice Moonitz October 1974 Primarily normative
David Solomons February 1975 Primarily normative
Carl Devine February 1975 Primarily normative
Stephen A. Zeff February 1975 Historical
Joel S. Demski November 1975 Analytical/empirical
Thomas R. Dyckman January 1976 Mainly empirical
Ross M. Skinner December 1976 Primarily normative
William W. Cooper December 1976 Eclectic
William H. Beaver July 1977 Mainly empirical
Sidney Davidson February 1978 Primarily normative
Robert S. Kaplan February 1978 Mainly empirical
Nils H. Hakansson August 1980 Mainly empirical
Robert Sprouse October 1982 Primarily normative
Baruch Lev September 1984 Mainly empirical
George J. Foster September 1985 Mainly empirical
Mark A. Wolfson September 1986 Mainly empirical
William Kinney September 1987 Mainly empirical
Raymond J. Ball September 1988 Mainly empirical
Shyam V. Sunder By 1991 Mainly empirical
James A. Ohlson By February 1992 Mainly empirical
Emeritus fellow
William A. Paton October 1974 Primarily normative
William J. Vatter October 1974 Primarily normative
William T. Baxter February 1975 Primarily normative
Table 5
Ballots held 1976–1977. Sources: #4884, #7540.
Nominee June 1976 July 1977
Yes No Abstain Yes No
Rashad Abdel-Khalik 2 8
William H. Beaver 8 2 11 1
Norton M. Bedford 4 6 6 6
Philip W. Bell 6 6
Harold Bierman 6 4 8 4
Abraham J. Briloff 4 6
Bryan Carsberg 5 4 1 6 6
William W. Cooper 7 2 1
Sidney Davidson 9 3
Nicholas Dopuch 4 6
Edgar O. Edwards 7 5
Charles T. Horngren 5 4 1 8 4
Robert S. Kaplan 9 3
Richard V. Mattessich 5 5 6 6
Michael Schiff 2 8
Ross Skinner 6 1 3
25
That is, a date immediately before the admission of Joel Demski.
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 373
cago dominated JAR while a fourth, Baruch Lev, earned his
doctorate at that university (Dyckman & Zeff, 1984).
26
It
can also be observed from Table 3 that only Hakansson
among the empirically-inclined researchers admitted over
the next seven years through to 1982 had signi?cantly en-
hanced their publication record by the date of admission.
It is therefore consistent with the evidence to conclude that
empiricists were initially excluded from ARIA because these
were the very individuals who were in?ltrating the elite
space within the academy that normative researchers had
previously occupied.
Once empiricists were admitted, they were of course
able to advocate the recruitment of like-minded individu-
als, and this quite naturally happened. For example, for
the ballot held in September 1976 Joel Demski presented
what he described as ‘‘an overwhelming case’’ for electing
Beaver who is lauded as one of the pioneering researchers
in the modern ?nance area and, in 1976, a leading expo-
nent of that type of research.
27
The composition of ARIA
changed, therefore, as its recruitment practices came to pri-
oritise the scholastic eminence of new Fellows rather than
the promotion of normative research within the academy.
The outcome was that ARIA became an academic elite with
‘‘no unifying spirit’’ (#7361, see below). With a fair amount
of con?dence, one might conclude that the seeds of the
unravelling of the Association were evident within a couple
of years of its foundation.
The activities of ARIA, studied below, show that its Fel-
lows were interested in acting as a pressure group to in?u-
ence the course of the accounting academy in the US and to
mount initiatives designed to address practical accounting
problems. Each of these actions can be interpreted as hav-
ing as its purpose to protect and enhance the position of
ARIA’s members within the academy’s social space.
Ambitions and frustrations
American Accounting Association
The central role played by the AAA in constructing the
US accounting academy and de?ning its elite practitioners
is well known (Lee, 1995). As well-credentialed research-
ers, the early members were therefore naturally concerned
with the priorities of this powerful body, and an early com-
munication from Sterling to his colleagues within ARIA (21
February 1975) expressed ‘‘increasing concern about the
direction of the AAA’’ (#7521).
28
One of Sterling’s worries
related to the manner in which the AAA spent its money
with, in his opinion, too much devoted to the recruitment
of ‘‘junior faculty college members . . . on the simplistic the-
ory that bigger is better’’, and too little to research (#7521).
He noted the ‘‘starvation’’ of funds for TAR which had been
the bastion of normative-based research and which had fa-
mously rejected Ball and Brown’s pioneering empirical study
on the grounds that ‘‘it was not an Accounting manuscript’’
(Brown, quoted in Dyckman & Zeff, 1984, p. 242). Sterling
also complained of ‘‘a very meager budget for research
monographs despite the fact that I think those monographs
have made a great contribution’’ (#7521) and an excessive
focus on unproductive committee activity (#7522). Part of
the problem, in Sterling’s estimation, was ‘‘the quality of
some of our recent presidents, in the sense that their biases
are at variance with mine’’. In attempt to reverse the trend,
Sterling encouraged members to lobby for the election of the
normative-inclined Maurice Moonitz who had recently been
admitted to ARIA (#7521). But he warned: ‘‘I don’t think that
we are going to change the Association very much’’ (#7524).
Sterling then wrote to Wilton T. Anderson, President of
the AAA, on behalf of ARIA, expressing concern for the fu-
ture of academic accounting and appending an analysis of
revenues and expenses to emphasise the lack of invest-
ment in research and a perceived over-spending on
recruitment and committees. This initiative failed to bear
fruit, with Sterling caustically remarking: ‘‘I fear that Andy
did not understand the point’’. With ‘‘Chuck’’ Horngren in
line for the presidency of AAA, Sterling expressed opti-
mism for more favourable consideration in the following
year (#4658). Horngren’s repeated unsuccessful candida-
ture for ARIA (though he may not have known of this) sig-
nals the failure of the Fellows to adopt a recruitment
strategy aligned to any desire to operate as an effective
pressure group.
A determined attempt made by ARIA’s Fellows to
mount a collaborative venture designed to advance
accounting practice is next examined.
The ‘‘Taxi’’ project
Soon after his admission to ARIA, Chambers suggested
that the internationalisation of academic engagement
might be a role for ARIA to pursue (#7518), particularly gi-
ven that it was an area neglected by the AAA. Chambers fa-
voured a meeting con?ned to idealists committed to
‘‘change’’ and to the development of a programme capable
of achieving change: ‘‘What we need is an integration of
ideas rather than continued aggressive assertion. I could
just hope that people dedicated to cleaning up the Augean
stables might agree on a point or two’’ (#7520).
Chambers’ idea sowed the seeds for the single collabo-
rative initiative mounted by ARIA, and it commenced with
a ‘‘Call for Papers’’ circulated by Sterling to ARIA Fellows on
1 February 1977 (#9501). Re?ecting his own (and Cham-
bers’) concern that research was insuf?ciently targeted to
produce practical solutions (Sterling, 1973b), Sterling pro-
vided context for the intended study by explaining that his
‘‘reading of the history of science’’ caused him to conclude
that ‘‘scienti?c progress (other than scienti?c revolutions)
is achieved by taking a very simple situation and examin-
ing it carefully and rigorously’’ (#9501). All transactions
were to be for cash so that the ‘‘major problem of account-
ing for this ?rm is the age old depreciation problem’’
(#9501). Fellows were invited to make speci?c recommen-
26
At that date Nicholas Dopuch, who was not invited to join until eight
years later, had 11 publications in TAR/JAR and was on the board of the
latter journal.
27
At the same ballot Ijiri and Dyckman, respectively, argued for the
admission of Cooper and Kaplan to ARIA.
28
Given their academic status, ARIA members were often heavily
involved with AAA affairs though, for some, most of that involvement
was to occur after election as a Fellow. For example, Zeff served as editor of
TAR (1977–1982) and President-elect and President of the AAA (1984–
1986).
374 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
dations about how to account for the ?rm to both manage-
ment and external users. Re?ecting his concern that re-
search should be practice-relevant, Sterling stressed the
need for accessibility: ‘‘so that your piece could be read
by the well-motivated practitioner’’. A two day conference
was proposed to discuss the papers, with the outcomes to
be published by Scholars Book Co. Sterling subsequently
reported that ?ve Fellows had agreed to prepare papers
29
but the rest had ‘‘regretfully declined’’ his invitation
(#9501). A taxi company became the agreed model for the
exercise, and the ‘‘Taxi Symposium’’ was held at the Jesse
H. Jones Graduate School of Administration, Rice University,
in May 1978.
Things did not go well.
Given that the object of the exercise was to produce a
publication which would help towards the solution of
practical problems, it seemed a logical decision to ask the
prominent practitioner and ARIA Fellow, Ross Skinner, to
undertake a synthesis of the papers presented at the sym-
posium. What most of the contributors made of Skinner’s
assessment is unknown, but some were highly agitated
by its contents. As Thomas put it: ‘‘To paraphrase Eddie
[Stamp], the headmaster has reported and the three of us
have been sent down’’. Concern centred on the ‘‘dismissal
of Ray [Chambers]’s contribution’’ and the ‘‘disregard’’ of
those penned by Stamp and Thomas himself (#9501). Tho-
mas sums up his assessment of Skinner’s treatment of his
own paper when suggesting (#9501) the following addi-
tion to one of his footnotes: ‘‘It would be neither appropri-
ate nor dif?cult for me to reply to observations by [Ross
Skinner]. . . but presumably that’s too strong’’.
Stamp wrote a characteristically feisty letter to Skinner
which included the following comments (#9501).
For example, I think it is unfortunate that you have cho-
sen the vehicle of your Synthesis to make such a strong
criticism of Art Thomas’ analysis of the allocation prob-
lem without at least debating some of your more
important points with him at the meeting.
. . .
The impact of your Synthesis on all three of us is the
academic equivalent of a bad debt. Through no fault
of our own the bene?ts that should have ?own from
what we have done have been diminished, and even
debased.
A different kind of concern with the outcome of the
‘‘Taxi’’ project centred on the way in which the delegates
constructed their contribution (#7546). Chambers told
Sterling that he found it ‘‘most disappointing . . . that so
few tackled the question you posed, so many gave it the
‘broad-sweep’ treatment, and there was so little that was
‘common’’’ (#9501). He continued:
For years it has seemed to me that a small group, of
well-informed men of goodwill, could not go on ‘‘talk-
ing past one another interminably’’. But I had no idea
of a method of focussing attention when points of view
were known to be scattered. I thought you had come up
with a viable way of bringing things to a head. I hoped
much of it.
Sterling and Thomas (both primarily normative
researchers) took responsibility for compiling Accounting
for a simpli?ed ?rm owning depreciable assets: seventeen es-
says and a synthesis based on a common case (Sterling &
Thomas, 1979) based on papers presented at the sympo-
sium. Although welcomed as ‘‘a useful survey of the cur-
rent state of thought’’ (Edey, 1983, p. 164), a common
de?ciency identi?ed by reviewers was the failure to ful?l
the raison d’être for the project, which was ‘‘to reach agree-
ment on a core theory of accounting’’. The dominant fea-
ture of the collection was rich diversity in potential
solutions to the depreciation issue rather than the desired
evidence of commonality (Edey, 1983; Friedman, 1981).
It is known that at least two further collaborative initia-
tives were contemplated by ARIA’s members. First, Sterling
reported (21 February 1975) that he and Thomas had dis-
cussed the establishment of a ‘‘quasi-journal’’ – ‘‘some-
thing in between a working paper and a fully ?edge[d]
journal’’. Sterling also announced his intention to try to
‘‘raise some funds to support a more formal journal’’
(#7521), but nothing came of these ideas. The second
scheme arose from a meeting of the Fellows in Atlanta in
1976 where it was decided to hold a symposium immedi-
ately before the 1977 AAA annual meeting in Portland,
Oregon (#4884, #7527). Ijiri circulated Fellows with a pro-
posal to make ‘‘current research issues in accounting’’ the
subject of the symposium, with each member invited ‘‘to
take responsibility for coming up with research proposals
on, say, ?ve or more research projects’’ (#7527). The
planned outcome was a monograph which Ijiri believed
would ‘‘become a best seller among doctoral students in
accounting and also among young academicians’’
(#7527). Dyckman devised a detailed format for research
proposals that Ijiri circulated in January 1977. It may be
that this initiative was overwhelmed by arrangements for
the ‘‘Taxi Symposium’’. Certainly, there is no further record
of it in the archives.
For further evidence of a desire on the part of at least
some Fellows to debate accounting issues, and of the ten-
sions that it revealed within the Association, events at
the single arena where Fellows periodically assembled
are now considered.
ARIA dinners
The ARIA dinners were held to coincide with the AAA
annual meeting and, as such, are the type of assembly
recognised by Bourdieu (1988, p. 84) as a valuable mecha-
nism for maintaining an elite’s social space. After meeting
together in this manner on three occasions, no dinner was
arranged for 1979. President Ijiri decided to revive things,
and wrote (22 April 1980): ‘‘[f]ollowing the tradition of
ARIA. . . I wish to propose that we have an informal meet-
ing over dinner on Sunday evening, August 10th [1980],
in Boston’’ (#5947). Ijiri’s suggestion that ‘‘each of us
[should] comment on what ARIA should do in the future’’
implies recognition of a need for renewal of the Associa-
tion’s activities. Certainly there is little evidence of much
29
In addition, Sterling supplied an Introduction for the book.
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 375
having been done in the two years since the ‘‘Taxi Sympo-
sium’’ other than to take the presentations through to pub-
lication. The outcome of the Boston meeting indicates that
ARIA’s members now saw a far less ambitious role for the
Association than its bylaws had earlier signalled: merely
that it ‘‘should remain in existence for the purpose of hold-
ing an annual dinner at the time of the AAA annual conven-
tion. After dinner there would be a discussion’’ (#7556).
Solomons further reported that the following two subjects
had been suggested for discussion at the 1981 Chicago
meeting:
(1) What forces will change accounting during the
remainder of this century?
(2) The experience of academics working with stan-
dard-setting bodies, and what this can tell us about
the future of the FASB.
The often weighty topics for debate at the annual dinner
in the years that followed, to the extent recorded in the ar-
chives, are reported in Table 6. Zeff (2011) had this to say
about them and their demise:
it was the President who called the dinners. And Joel
Demski, as the last President, didn’t call a dinner [in
1992], and that was the end of ARIA. Chambers could
hardly keep it going from his outpost in Australia.
Devine never attended the dinners . . . The ARIA dinners
were a feast for the kind of discussion that appealed to
thinkers who liked to cross swords in policy debate,
especially when criticizing the empirical agenda. In
my experience, most empiricists are not thinkers in that
sense.
30
Pareto and Mosca interpret history in terms of continu-
ous competition (though not necessarily conscious compe-
tition) for elite status within a given social space, with one
group replacing another repeatedly over time as the for-
mer loses its vigour (Pareto, 1935, p. 1431). This is not,
however, an imminent outcome at any particular point in
time. The circulation of elites can be resisted in a number
of ways which include the existing elite recruiting into
its stratum innovators from below in the social order. In
this way the current elite reinvigorates itself by opening
its ranks to some of its ablest opponents (Mosca, 1939).
It might be argued that the transformation of ARIA’s
recruitment strategy late-1975 re?ects conscious or
unconscious engagement with such a philosophy. This
interpretation is consistent with the ‘‘Taxi Symposium’’
project and the annual dinners, each of which had as its
purpose to improve accounting through collaboration be-
tween early and later recruits. However, delving more dee-
ply into the narrative surrounding the dinners, in the next
section, we ?nd no great enthusiasm on the part of primar-
ily normative researchers to accommodate innovations in
accounting thought emanating from empiricists-cum-pos-
itivists. It is also quite possible that the newly emerging
elite had no intention of collaborating, and perhaps being
captured by the old guard, which is an issue addressed in
our concluding comments.
No unifying spirit within the ‘‘inquisitive elite’’
Chambers believed that attempts to address de?cien-
cies in accounting practice suffered from the fact that
‘‘the practising and academic arms of the profession are
at an intellectual arm’s length’’ (#7523). A letter to Sterling
(20 August 1975) expressed disappointment that ‘‘aca-
demic writing in the ?eld has concerned itself so little with
practitioners’ problems and practical issues, and so much
with fancy statistical and quasi-mathematical exercises,
over the last 15 years’’ (#7523). Anticipating Zeff’s valedic-
tory comments as retiring editor of TAR in 1983 (Zeff, 1989,
p. 170), Chambers considered such work to focus princi-
pally on the design of inquiries rather than on accounting
content. Warming to his theme, Chambers proposed that
ARIA should lobby the AAA to support ‘‘only work of a cer-
tain type’’, and sought to justify his antipathy for recent re-
search innovations as follows:
It has happened in other ?elds that new-fangled ideas
have turned out to be a delusion; and I would like to
think that, as in those ?elds, some [in accounting]
would stand up and point to the waste of time and
effort which ?ows from too easy a pursuit of what is
fashionable (#7523).
Sterling replied to Chambers (27 August 1975): ‘‘I share
your views, as you may have been able to discern from my
discussion of the Gonedes–Dopuch piece’’, presumably
referring to Gonedes and Dopuch’s (1974a) paper on capi-
tal markets research (#7524). JAR was of course the pre-
mier outlet for much of this kind of work, and Sterling
described it as ‘‘one of the greatest surprises of my life
when a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago recently con-
fessed (rather proudly) that he had read nothing other than
that journal when studying for his doctorate’’ (#7524).
Ironically, it was soon after this exchange took place that
Demski was admitted, signalling the change in recruitment
Table 6
Selected ARIA dinners. Sources: #/7558, #7560, #7564, #7586, #7587,
#7592.
Year Place Topic
1982 San Diego Academics and regulators—problems of
collaboration
1983 New
Orleans
Agency theory: what have we learned of
relevance to accounting and what is the
appropriate future of this paradigm?
1986 New York The role of the accounting profession and
accounting standards in promoting the
industrial development of nations
1987 Cincinnati The Kinney–Cooper–Zeff debate
1988 Orlando The FASB: What should its thinking be about,
and how should it be organised?
1989 Honolulu Productivity issues in universities, with
speci?c reference to ways to promote
productivity of senior faculty
1991 Nashville Sterling’s Abacus (1990) article, Positive
accounting: an assessment
30
This sentiment was shared by another regular participant in the ARIA
dinners, David Solomons (1994, p. ix): ‘‘The blight of ‘positive accounting
theory’ . . . has left little room for the broad theorizing about accounting (as
distinct from accountants) that attracts accounting thinkers’’.
376 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
strategy that fatally undermined the potential for ARIA to
function as an instrument for countering the tide of empir-
ical research.
Differences in research outlook between some ARIA
members and leading empiricist-cum-positivist research-
ers resurface on a number of occasions in the Chambers Ar-
chive. A letter from Sterling to Cooper (23 March 1987)
welcomes the Cooper–Zeff criticism
31
of Kinney’s 1986 pa-
per in TAR, and then moves on to voice disapproval of ‘‘an
agency theory paper by Butterworth, Gibbons and King’’
and to express his astonishment ‘‘at the lack of [accounting]
knowledge of the three authors’’. Sterling continues
(#7568):
I guess that I should not continue to be astounded
because I often interview PhD candidates who seem to
have a ?rm grasp of Finance or Human Information Pro-
cessing or something else but have no knowledge of
Accounting beyond that contained in an intermediate
text book.
Cooper is further informed that some pages in Toward a
Science of Accounting (Sterling, 1979, pp. 48–53) arose out
of Sterling’s role as joint-discussant (Sterling & Harrison,
1974) of ‘‘the Gonedes–Dopuch paper [Gonedes & Dopuch,
1974a] at the Chicago Empirical Research Conference in
1974’’ (#7568).
32
Sterling described the paper as:
a long and convoluted argument . . . coupled with a ser-
ies of rather vitriolic attacks on all non ef?cient market
research. As a consequence, I had some rather critical
things to say. They replied in what I thought at the time
was a rather hysterical manner (#7568).
Sterling’s further objection to the Gonedes–Dopuch po-
sition was their ‘‘de?ning Accounting in accordance with
their idiosyncratic views and then rejecting all other kinds
of research’’ (#7568). Sterling also recounted an earlier
episode where Gonedes dismissed ‘‘an experiment in what
would nowbe called ‘experimental economics’ . . . and then
campaigned against the continuation of the research’’.
Worse, in Sterling’s judgement: ‘‘he got some of his col-
leagues to join with him in ridiculing the PhD candidate
who was performing the experiment for his dissertation’’
with the result that the candidate dropped out of the
PhD programme (#7568).
Around the same time (30 March 1987), Kaplan wrote
to Cooper expressing his pleasure at reading Cooper’s reply
(later published as Cooper & Zeff, 1992) to Kinney’s paper
(Kinney, 1986). Kaplan moved on to criticise ‘‘academic
colleagues [who] have gotten themselves too narrowly fo-
cused on research methods with high internal validity and
have overlooked the importance of having some research
with high external validity in order to guide more formal
analyses’’ (#7570). Kaplan argued that ‘‘academics who
are most divorced from practice, have opted for rigor at
the expense of relevance’’ and continued: ‘‘I would like to
see a discussion of the Kinney and Cooper–Zeff papers at
the ARIA meeting this summer’’ (#7570).
33
Strong support
for the planned exchange came from Chambers who ex-
pressed ‘‘every sympathy with the spirit of the Cooper–Zeff
paper’’ (#7576). Indeed, he saw it as an overdue opportunity
for ARIA to assert itself (#7576): ‘‘I expected that ARIA might
have adopted a critical stance on the new cult years ago’’,
but then puts his ?nger on the dif?culty of doing so: ‘‘I sus-
pect that there is too diverse a membership to imagine that
members would stand collectively for anything’’ (#7576).
Reference to ‘‘cult’’ portended Chambers (1993) article titled
‘‘Positive accounting theory and the PA cult’’. The Chambers
Archive reveals that this piece had been in draft form since
the late 1980s and that Chambers had requested comments
from members of the ‘‘cult’’ but received no responses
(Chambers, 1993, p. 1). Whilst Chambers was seeking those
comments Sterling’s (1990) piece on ‘‘Positive accounting:
an assessment’’ appeared in Abacus. It seems that the private
dinners and correspondence within ARIA had been jetti-
soned by these two Fellows in favour of a more public airing
of their concerns.
The last ARIA dinner was held in Nashville, in August
1991 (Table 6), where Sterling (1990) was the subject of
discussion. There, Sterling’s provocative ‘‘recommenda-
tion’’ was ‘‘to classify positive accounting theory as a ‘cot-
tage industry’ at the periphery of accounting thought and
reject its attempt to take centre stage by radically rede?n-
ing the fundamental question of accounting’’ (Sterling,
1990, p. 97). Chambers expressed disappointment with
‘‘the drift of the ARIA meeting’’ where there were ‘‘the
‘hard heads’ on both sides who were not about to yield,
and there was ambivalence among the rest of us as to
whether it mattered’’ (#7361).
As the demise of ARIA became imminent, the question
of how Sterling felt about his ‘‘brain child’’ was raised by
Chambers (20 September 1991, #7361). Re?ecting on Ster-
ling’s initiative nearly 20 years earlier, Chambers con-
cluded that it was ‘‘a promising idea in the ‘70s to
suppose that interchanges between an inquisitive elite
[through ARIA] might reduce grounds for differences of
opinion by recourse to ?rm knowledge not usually consid-
ered by protagonists of this or that’’ (#7361, emphasis
added). Achievement of that aim was undermined, in
Chambers’ estimation, because ARIA ‘‘became composed,
in part, of diametrically opposed individuals, determined
as it seems to hold to their prior commitments, come what
31
This paper was presented at the Southwest Regional AAA meeting in
Houston in March 1987 (#7572), and was then placed together with
Kinney’s (1986) paper on the agenda for discussion at ARIA’s 1987
Cincinnati dinner meeting. It ultimately achieved publication as Cooper
and Zeff (1992). The thrust of Cooper and Zeff’s (1992) criticism is that
Kinney adopts too narrow a de?nition of empirical accounting research,
being a ‘‘‘pure science only approach’’ con?ned to techniques of statistical
experiment design and regression–correlation analysis (#7572).
32
Although publishing the Gonedes–Dopuch response (Gonedes &
Dopuch, 1974b) to Sterling and Harrison’s criticisms, Dopuch (as editor of
the special issue of JAR) had refused to accept further comment from
Sterling. His decision is not of course inconsistent with common editorial
practice.
33
The elder statesman amongst ARIA’s Fellows, Maurice Moonitz,
contributed to this discussion (26 March 1987) when commenting on
‘‘the basic undesirability of focusing exclusively on one kind of research
methodology’’ (#7571). However, he counselled the need for care, in
arguing for a broader conception of acceptable methodologies, ‘‘not to give
the impression we [i.e. primarily normative researchers] are in favour of
less rigor rather than more rigor’’ (#7571).
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 377
may. There was and is no unifying spirit’’ (#7361, emphasis
added).
Certainly, Chambers harboured little respect for some of
his ARIA colleagues (and we cannot be sure that he con-
?ned his vitriol to empiricists), whom he describes as
‘‘individuals known for ‘being known’—some by reason of
de?nitive and surviving contributions (a helluva word!),
some by reason of having small ?ngers in many pies, some
no doubt by reason of notoriety or omnipresence’’ (#7361).
Given the failure of ARIA to function in an effective man-
ner, Chambers is unsurprised by its lack of practical im-
pact: ‘‘When practitioners are so cohesively supportive of
their conventions, it might unsettle their complacency if
an equally cohesive stance were to confront what is so
widely regarded with disdain. But there is no such stance
[by ARIA]’’ (#7361). His ?nal exasperated comment was:
‘‘So many want to ‘be different’ that cohesion is thought
to be intellectually ‘unsmart’’’ (#7361).
34
This paper has argued that lack of ‘‘cohesion’’ within
ARIA must be attributed to the dramatic change that oc-
curred in the composition of its membership in terms of
their research outlook. The eventual demise of ARIA can
be attributed to the changing composition of ARIA’s leader-
ship (Table 1). Sterling as founder President was succeeded
by Ijiri and then by Solomons. After 1982 the majority of
presidents were mainly empirical in outlook as were all
the Secretary-Treasurers from 1986 onwards (except Zeff,
1990–1991). ARIA’s story ends with both of?ces occupied
by empiricists-cum-positivists—Demski as President and
Sunder as Secretary-Treasurer. Zeff (2011) provides the fol-
lowing insightful explanation for the demise of ARIA:
by 1992 or so, Sterling had retired, Staubus had retired,
Moonitz had retired, Solomons had retired, Sprouse had
retired, Davidson had retired, Cooper had retired, and
Thomas had retired. Without university funds available
to them, they had to pay their own way to the AAA
annual meetings. Cooper, Staubus and Solomons
attended to the end, but they were not enough to keep
it going.
It is noteworthy that none of those who Zeff implicitly
links with the ARIA ideal were from the empirical camp.
He continues: ‘‘the membership steadily expanded to take
in empiricists and ‘analytical’ researchers, who did not take
to such discussion. And it [ARIA] died out’’ (Zeff, 2011).
Our interpretation of events aligns with Zeff’s view and
is shared by George Staubus when commenting on the
three objectives that he identi?ed for ARIA (see above):
‘‘The ?rst two were belied by the admission of unsympa-
thetic members. The third left us with an amorphous group
with no central scholarly interest’’ (Staubus, 2011b). Ulti-
mately, the pursuit of elitism became more important than
its original goal. Drawing on Parry’s (1956, pp. 59–60)
study of elites, it can also be said that the initial core of
ARIA failed to be ‘‘aware of fundamental currents of change
in society’’, here the rise of the scienti?c, ‘‘and hence
lack[ed] the ?exibility and skill to accommodate the new
social forces’’.
Concluding remarks
The American political scientist Marlan Blissett (quoted
in Williams, Jenkins, and Ingraham (2006, p. 791)) points
out that: ‘‘Elites do not happen; they are created, and the
chief creators are men at prestigious institutions who con-
trol (1) recruitment and membership into the high eche-
lons of scienti?c work, (2) the ?ow of communication, (3)
appointments, (4) special subsidies, and (5) honori?c
awards’’. There is now a signi?cant weight of research tes-
tifying to such arrangements within the accounting acad-
emy. Lee and Williams (1999, p. 872) have shown,
consistent with ideas of Bourdieu (1988) and Whitley
(1984), that ‘‘academic communities are structured hierar-
chically with controlling elites, and that these elites utilise
mechanisms within the hierarchy to control knowledge,
enhance reputations, and maintain the reproductive or-
der’’. Transcending other signals of elite status (e.g. edito-
rial and editorial board appointments, research prizes,
admission to halls of fame) based on the amassment of
academic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984, 1988) are
publications in the most prestigious research journals. Luk-
ka and Kasanen (1996, p. 770; see also: Reiter & Williams,
2002, p. 586; Rodgers & Williams, 1996) summarise the
dynamics in the following manner: ‘‘Publication forums
form one of the key elements in controlling the social order
in the academic world: almost only by publishing in the
well-ranked research journals can one gain, or preserve, a
reputation in the ?eld’’.
Studies of perceived journal quality published towards
the end date of the ARIA story (1993) reveal that JAR and
TAR continued to occupy top places in the ?elds of account-
ing and ?nance (Hull & Wright, 1990, p. 88; see also How-
ard & Nikolai, 1983),
35
with the Journal of Accounting and
Economics (JAE), launched by Rochester’s Ross L. Watts and
Jerold L. Zimmerman in 1979, taking third place. The domi-
nant research paradigm in all three of these journals was
(and is) economics based, causing Williams and Rodgers
(1995) to conclude that this was (as it continues to be) at
the pinnacle among competing reputational systems. The
desire of faculty to place their publications with top-ranked
journals has become a greater priority over the last two dec-
ades or so under pressure from university administrators
keen to raise their institution’s international pro?le and, in
some locations, to help maximise the share of government
funding based on rankings achieved in national research
assessment exercises. Lee’s (1995, p. 259; see also Lukka &
Kasanen, 1996, p. 771) study of the US academy con?rms
‘‘an institutionalized academic strategy focusing on research
rather than teaching’’ that created ‘‘a competitive and hier-
archical university ?eld, in which attention is paid mainly
to the production and maintenance of cultural capital’’.
There are two basic concerns, today, with the conse-
quences of elitism within the academy. First, there is
34
This is of course a comment that might be made with equal force by
advocates of any particular set of ideas.
35
Scores respectively of 226.48 and 225.74 placed them way ahead of the
next-ranked journal on 175.40, Journal of Finance.
378 J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381
apprehension concerning the ability of accounting’s elite
practitioners to move research forward in ‘‘an organiza-
tional structure erected mainly to guarantee that control
remains’’ within the kind of elite grouping (Reiter & Wil-
liams, 2002, p. 602) that Klein (2005: 145) describes as
‘‘a self-organizing, self-validating club’’. For such critics,
‘‘The US accounting academy . . . seems now to be orga-
nized mainly to produce politically correct academic repu-
tations’’ (Reiter & Williams, 2002, p. 602). The second issue
concerns the contribution which empirical work has made
to moving forward accounting as an academic discipline.
Citing numerous authorities, Williams et al. (2006, pp.
813–814; see also: Chabrak, 2012; Ravenscroft & Williams,
2009) conclude: ‘‘After 35 years of extensive ?nancial
reporting research, ?nancial reporting is no better and
the case could be made that it is worse than it was before
all of this research effort started’’.
Late in his career, the founder of ARIA remained doubt-
ful whether either normative or positivist research had
done much to improve accounting practice. Upon being in-
ducted to the Ohio University Accounting Hall of Fame in
2006 (quoted in Clarke & Dean (2007, p. 66)), Sterling la-
mented that his career had to be described as a failure
since:
Accounting is very nearly the same in my end as it was
in my beginning. what was being put in accountants’
minds . . . [in the current texts are] the same useless
concepts, invalid claims and senseless numerals that I
studied in my ?rst accounting class circa 1952 . . . Strike
one . . . the careless use of language . . . If avoiding equiv-
ocal terms requires jargon, invent it. Jargon is undesir-
able but it is better than equivocation. In my
beginning I identi?ed this error and its solution. In my
end I am still identifying it. Strike two.
36
Sterling’s assessment is perhaps unduly pessimistic gi-
ven that the ideas of normative researchers today feature
prominently in conceptual frameworks and standard set-
ting practices around the world. But little of this achieve-
ment can be attributed to the work of ARIA which failed
to contribute much at all towards the furtherance of nor-
mative research or to the improvement of accounting prac-
tice. It therefore seems reasonable to interpret the history
ARIA as a missed opportunity to in?uence the course of
academic accountancy. The institution offered an arena
which could have been exploited much more energetically,
and with far greater single-mindedness, to support and
promote normative research. Its early membership in-
cluded leading contemporary normative theorists and
there is little doubt that they could have recruited many
other prominent proponents of that research paradigm. If
they had expanded their membership base and, say, ac-
tively pursued a normative agenda within the AAA, suc-
cessfully launched a new journal sympathetic to their
ideals (they gave consideration to this), and worked harder
to develop links with the accounting profession, who
knows how different the accounting research landscape
would be today? As it was, they left the arena open for
politically astute proponents of the empiricist-cum-posi-
tivist school to replace normative theorists within the aca-
demic social order.
The irony of the ARIA story lies in the astonishing deci-
sion of the early members to transform their recruitment
strategy and admit new Fellows based on the same reputa-
tional system that had made themselves elite given that
the newly prestigious empirical accounting journals, JAR
and later JAE – together with TAR’s radically revised per-
ceptions of what counted as legitimate (‘‘state-of-the-
art’’) accounting knowledge – were now de?ning the aca-
demic elite within the accounting academy. Founder, Bob
Sterling, and the early members may therefore be accused
of a complete inability to understand fully the implications
of the empirical revolution in accounting in the US,
37
and it
was this failure that doomed the Association from early on
in its life cycle. Most of the recruits from late 1975 onwards
were individuals whose choice of degree school and schol-
arly pursuits labelled them as academics committed to elim-
inating from the academy the very kind of scholarship that
the early members valued.
Empiricists-cum-positivists as an elite group have, in
contrast, proved extremely successful in protecting and
perpetuating its cultural capital by de?ning ‘‘what consti-
tutes valid accounting knowledge’’ (Fogarty, 2011, p. 32)
and through a variety of strategies to encourage ‘‘repro-
duction of the corps’’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 84). Consistent
with the idea of circulation of elites, however, the current
principal focus of academic endeavour should prove to be
a temporary phenomenon. Re?ecting on the rejection of
Ball and Brown’s paper by TAR in the late-1960s, because
it was ‘‘not an Accounting manuscript’’, Hopwood (2007,
p. 1367, emphasis added) made the following observation:
There were then, there have been in the intervening
period, and there are now people who think that they
know what accounting—and auditing for that matter—
is. How wrong these people are. They are the ones
who list the attributes of the status quo, seemingly
wanting to con?ne the new to being within the bound-
aries of the old. They have no conception that account-
ing and accounting research have repeatedly changed
across time, and when things change they become what
they were not, at least in part. Accounting has been a
craft that has had no essence. It has changed signi?-
cantly across time, adopting new forms, methods, and
roles. Likewise for accounting research.
Studying there as a Fulbright Scholar in the second half
of the 1960s, Hopwood (2007) provides an insider’s assess-
ment of the role played by the University of Chicago in re-
search innovation that, in due course, deprived leading
normative researchers of their elite status within the acad-
36
Similar sentiments are expressed in Williams et al. (2006, pp. 813–
814).
37
A number of the later recruits to ARIA, as well as Dopuch and Schipper
who rejected invitations to join, were associated with the University of
Chicago; the intellectual home of the ideologically-inspired (in contrast to
scienti?cally-inspired) neoliberal revolution that, among its outcomes, saw
accounting research ‘‘dominated by the neoclassical discourse of monetary
?nance’’ and the information metaphor replace the ‘‘accountability meta-
phor that had been the root of accounting practice for centuries’’
(Ravenscroft & Williams, 2009, p. 774; see also pp. 755–757).
J.R. Edwards et al. / Accounting, Organizations and Society 38 (2013) 365–381 379
emy. He tells us that much of the changed approach to
accounting research was ‘‘largely a revolution from below’’
(Hopwood, 2007, p. 1366) based on the work of doctoral
students such as Ray Ball, Bill Beaver, Philip Brown, Joel
Demski and Ross Watts. Further: ‘‘For believers in the non-
hierarchical nature of good research cultures, accounting
research at Chicago at this time [the 1960s] provides an
excellent example’’. Successful innovators, such as these,
became part of the new elite that, in turn, needs to guard
against losing the vigour and ?exibility required to re-
spond to changing conditions. Concerning what Nadel
(1956, p. 424) refers to as ‘‘cycles of transformation’’, Hop-
wood’s (2007, p. 1370) following observation is apposite:
‘‘The dynamic for change and transformation that emerged
in the early Chicago days is seemingly no longer with us’’.
Over the last few decades, much of the innovation and
diversi?cation in accounting research has occurred outside
the US. In Lukka and Kasanen’s (1996, p. 755, p. 772) esti-
mation there has grown up around Accounting, Organiza-
tions and Society and other ‘‘critical’’ journals an
‘‘emerging, mostly European élite’’ specialising in ‘‘organi-
zational and social issues’’. Certainly we can see parallels in
the motivations for creating JAR and AOS. Whereas JAR was
intended to counter TAR’s reluctance ‘‘to accept articles
with a heavy empirical or quantitative content’’ (Davidson
in Dyckman & Zeff, 1984, p. 282), Hopwood’s (1988, p.
xxvi) vision was for AOS to be ‘‘exclusively concerned with
the organizational, behavioural, and social analyses of
accounting’’ partly to counterbalance an overemphasis in
premier research journals on the quanti?able and scien-
ti?c. Nearly two decades ago Lukka and Kasanen (1996,
p. 771; see also Lee & Williams, 1999, p. 887) suggested
that ‘‘In Bourdieu’s terms, it is interesting to ponder
whether another elite, acting mostly through AOS, is now
in a process of emerging in the area of accounting re-
search’’. Certainly empiricists-cum-positivists remain
ascendant in the US, and elsewhere, but challenge to their
elite status continues.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the following for their com-
ments on earlier aspects of this work: Christopher Nobes,
George Staubus, Alfred Wagenhofer, Stephen P. Walker
and Stephen A. Zeff. They are also grateful for insightful
comments and criticisms from the editor and anonymous
referees.
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