Some feel that accounting procedures should be considered “an iron cage” – while others see them more as a “sprawling network”. Either way, there are differences between accountants’ use of ‘Provisional Numbers’ and ‘False Numbers’. As Martha Lampland, Associate Professor in the department of sociology at the University of California, San Diego explains in a […]
Tag: accounting
Accounting songs and dance
Principles of accounting — the song from act 2 of the mini-opera “The Count of Infinity”, which premiered at the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Principles of accounting — the song-and-dance from the US Department of Defense, which “is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion it spent on […]
Great Circus Adventures in Accounting (2009)
The turn of the century brought a new openness to, and maybe even nostalgia and yearning for, accounting adventure, symbolized by the publication of a jaunty paper. “Juggling the Books: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia,” Lorne Cummings and Mark Valentine St. Leon, Accounting History, vol. 14, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. 11–33 […]
Great adventures in accounting
The supposedly staid, unglamorous field of accounting is in fact packed, to some degree, with exciting adventures. But accountants rarely divulge this fact to persons outside the profession. Three monographs, all produced in Australia, document some of the adventure – and even some of the excitement. In 1967, a paper by Professor RJ Chambers, of […]