Abstract
During the month of May 2013, selected items drawn from the extensive personal collection of Professor Lee D Parker of the University of South Australia were made available for public display at a University of South Australia exhibition entitled “Mesopotamia and money: The missing link – accounting!”. The exhibition was formally launched by Professor Garry D Carnegie of RMIT University on 14 May 2013. The transcript of his welcoming address appears below for the record and as an item of general interest.
It is a great pleasure and a privilege to be invited to present this welcoming address at the launch of the exhibition “Mesopotamia and money: The missing link – accounting!”. Importantly, this event is part of “About Time: South Australia’s History Festival” and is centred on the University of South Australia Library.
The exhibition features many fine examples of books, pamphlets, and the like from Professor Lee D Parker’s personal collection comprising in excess of 1,300 items on accounting history, management and business dating from the seventeenth century – a collection which has been assembled since the mid-1970s. I have ascertained that the most prolific author in the collection is “Anonymous”!
Professor Parker’s contribution to research and publication in accounting has been and remains at the top end of high performance. His collection, as represented here tonight, is also outstanding and is one of the best personal collections of the genre in the world.
Accounting, of course, is not new and dates back thousands of years. The earliest accounting records were found in Mesopotamia amongst the ruins of ancient Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria. These records date back more than 5,000 years (Keister, 1963). The earliest accounting frauds have also been traced to Mesopotamia (Jones, 2011: 1, 14). While accounting today is commonly known as the “language of business”, money underpins that language as accounting records, including financial statements, are often expressed in monetary terms. Money, therefore, may be conveniently regarded as the “language of accounting”.
In the case of the interests and work of Professor Parker, accounting has always been positioned in a wider context (i.e. accounting is located and studied within the context of business and management). On reviewing the collection descriptive list, it is not difficult to discern Professor Parker’s long association with what is known today as “management accounting”, previously “cost accounting”, which essentially relates to preparing accounting information for management planning and organizational control. Such accounting, however, is concerned with the production and use of financial and non-financial information.
Let’s delve a little further into the missing link – “Accounting!”.
What is accounting?
Probably one of the most commonly used definitions of accounting comes from the American Institute of Accountants (now the American Institute of Certified Public Accountant), which formulated the following definition of “accounting” in 1941 as “… the art of recording, classifying, and summarizing in a significant manner and in terms of money, transactions and events which are, in part at least, of a financial character, and interpreting the results thereof” (American Institute of Accountants, 1953: 9). This definition, dating back in excess of 70 years, is still widely used in accounting texts and the like.
Nowadays, accounting is broadly regarded as a “technical practice” and as a “social practice”. As a technical practice, accounting is a set of techniques, procedures and practices that are deployed to prepare accounting reports, such as financial statements, for dissemination or publication and examination and analysis. When conceived as a technical practice, accounting is regarded as essentially numerical computation with a primary concern for the determination and reporting of revenue, expenses, profits or losses, net assets, costs, ratios, and so on. Under this conception, accounting is perceived as a neutral, if not benign, practice.
In recent decades, perceptions of accounting have broadened as the impacts of accounting have been subject to greater attention by contemporary and historical accounting researchers. While accounting is still acknowledged as involving technical practice, it is increasingly recognized around the globe for its effects on people, organizations and society. Accounting is now regarded as social and institutional in orientation, that is, as a social practice. Under this conception, accounting is constitutive and also pervasive. Accounting, therefore, provides a means to enact, establish or create altered or new conditions for the conduct and evaluation of our work and life. In short, accounting is increasingly seen as an instrument of power and control within organizations and society. It’s not just about the numbers and the balancing of them! Within accounting research and publication, researchers in recent times have more generally developed a concern for identifying and assessing the impacts of accounting on human behaviour and, therefore, on organizational and social functioning and development.
So what?
The relevance of this dichotomy relates to elaborating the nature of the items that comprise the Exhibition being formally opened this evening. Most of the accounting and related works on public display span the period 1880 to 1950 and generally portray accounting as a technical practice. The focus of these works is primarily on the “doing of accounting” in particular ways. Their prime concern tends to be with the provision of instruction in the establishment and maintenance of accounting procedures and systems within organizations. Some of these authors, of course, may have been aware that accounting, once introduced or reformed, had consequences for the behaviour of individuals and for organizational and social functioning and development, but it is suspected that such impacts, even if identified, were providing little, if any, impediment to their overall intention of advancing the state of accounting as a technology. And a technology it was. Indeed, Melvil Dewey classified accounting within the field of “technology” under his library classification system, known as “Dewey Decimal Classification” (DDC), which was conceived in 1873 and first published in 1876 (Dewey Services – OCLC, 2013). For those who may not be aware or have forgotten, accounting is found at “657”.
What is technology? According to the Webster’s Dictionary (1952 edition), “technology” is “that branch of knowledge that deals with the various industrial arts”. The same dictionary defined “accounting” as “the art of reckoning or adjusting accounts”. Such definitions emphasize the “doing” focus in accounting when perceived as a technical practice.
Accounting of the past is speaking to us through the books and other artefacts in this exhibition. Accounting literature of the future will, hopefully, put more emphasis on understanding and assessing the consequences of accounting and accounting change within organizations of all kinds and within society in general, whether such impacts were intended or unintended.
The books and artefacts on display at this exhibition, among a great many others, have all added legitimacy to accounting, in the modern era, as both a technical practice and as a social practice. Some might look old, worn, and even dusty, but they have done their job and continue to help us to better understand accounting’s past as well as to provide insights into accounting’s present and its possible future orientation.