“IT'S OYSTERS, DEAR!” PROFESSOR CARNEGIE'S PRESCRIPTION AND THE SEEMING FATE OF ACCOUNTING HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES

Abstract

It is always a thrill to find someone who is familiar with one's work. I well recall the time that someone first came up to me at a conference and advised that she/he had read my work during Ph.D. studies, had thought it marvelous, and so on. I will not embarrass the colleague in question by naming names; suffice it to say that he/she is now a well-known academic at an institution not far removed from my own. The question, I suppose, is, who should be more embarrassed in reviewing such a navigation of the tropes of conference life, the then student bent on making a good impression or the lonesome academic who so very much wanted to believe what was being said? It was with a frisson of excitement therefore that I found that our good colleague Carry Carnegie had penned a response to the recent review paper written by Dick Fleischman and myself. I have not had a comment on a paper come quite so soon before, and so there were loud echoes of that first conference encounter and exchange of familiarity in work when I first heard of this note. Unfortunately, the frisson of excitement is gone, and the familiarity with the work in question seems distant. Whether more or less distant than that of my earlier interrogator is for the reader to decide. Carnegie starts well enough with a strong precis of arguments made in the piece regarding the seeming decline of accounting in the He notes a series of factors including the apparent exclusion of accounting from major journals, a failure to renew the accounting professoriate in the U.S., the lack of available doctoral training in the U.S., and the declining membership of the Academy of Accounting Historians. Carnegie lists these factors without apparent disagreement and then wishes to share in the hope that the authors, Dick and I, came to in wanting not to believe that the nineties might become known as ending with the quiet but discernable of accounting in the U.S. Carnegie mentions that he added the emphasis here, but in a way he need not have; the original manuscript used the term death but as with any co-authorship, a more measured colleague (in this case Dick) called on a less measured colleague (in this case me, I admit) to cool it. So rattles might have been too strong, but a sense that the end of the 1990s marked a tipping point in the trajectory of accounting seems to hold true. In a way, I wish I had not cooled it for the sounds of the rattles are, quite honestly, clearly there in each of the gatherings of friends that constitute the Academy of Accounting Historians' annual research conferences and in the lovely ice cream socials held at the annual meetings of the American Accounting Association.1 I say this despite the promising inclusion of accounting in the body of the AAAs annual meeting program even though this comes under the delightful title of History, Integrative and Other.2 So next on to Carnegie and to the other. What is Professor Carnegie's prescription to cure that which ails the accounting academy in the U.S? It is to write popular works of the type he lauds in his text (e.g., Parker, 2005; Brewster, 2003; or Squires et al., 2003). In other words, a blast of populism should show the public interest benefits of a keen understanding of accounting and should allow us all to join friend Carnegie in his belief that answer of whether accounting in the faces should be overwhelmingly negative. Where to begin? An immediate observation would be that a similar prescription of populist appeal is hardly of attraction or interest to capital market researchers, agency theorists, or others who toil in their allotments within the AAAs intellectual array. So in that sense, we are different people with a different lot.3 A further observation, and as a trained field researcher who combined this with historical work that did not quite meet the 30-year rule alluded to by Carnegie (and so had a closer link to practice, or a history of the present, something Carnegie seems to like) I would simply say, there is no substitute for lived experience. …