A rejoinder to the commentaries on Professor Chambers' 1999 paper the poverty of accounting discourse

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Notes

1. Tinker and Puxty (1995, pp. 5–7) had described these sagas as the ‘social context’ that had preceded the demise of ‘normative accounting’ and its replacement with ‘positive accounting theory’ in the 1970s.

2. Were Chambers responding to this point we feel certain he would respond as he did in his posthumously published article, ‘Life on the Fringe: An Accounting Odyssey’ (2000a, p. 321). ‘Homer's tale of Ulysses has left a legacy of allusions, figures of speech, used today by people who have never heard of Homer—the wooden Horse, the Lotus eaters, the Cyclops, the Syrens, Scylla and Chaybdis—a mixture of successes and difficulties. It may seem arrogant of me to use a title of for a modern time lacking the trappings of the myths’. This example is indicative of Chambers' breadth of reading—something further confirmed by his An Accounting Thesaurus (1995).

3. That correspondence is contained in the R. J. Chambers Archive Collection in The University of Sydney's Fisher Library (item #7442). Following the final stages of cataloguing, classification and testing the collection opened in mid-November 2004. Eventually, it is proposed that full text versions of about 10% of his letters and related correspondence will be scanned and available to researchers on the web (at http://chambers.econ.usyd.edu.au).

4. Mattessich's ‘dark mood’ comment seems to imply that Chambers ‘Poverty’ was the outpourings of a beaten man, or that he was now ‘defiant’ and ‘aggressive’, prescient of his demise. Nothing is further from the truth. He did not have a life-threatening illness. He had an accident and died several days later of head and internal injuries, leaving several papers in progress, including early draft chapters of a proposed monograph, Wisdom of Accounting (Chambers, 2004). The first draft of ‘Poverty’ was written in 1992 for seminar presentation (see Chambers and Dean, 2000, pp. 241). Chambers' willingness, always, even approaching his eighties, to get on the soapbox is inconsistent with a descriptor that he was supposedly ‘Dark’.

5. Particulars relating to these unexpected corporate failures are contained in Clarke et al. (2003).

6. J. Spinner, ‘Sullied accounting firms requiring political clout’, ‘Washington Post’, Business section, 13 May 2002. A fuller account of this appears in M. A. Morrison (2004).

7. It is of interest that Eagleton, one of the leading critical theorists, cited by Tinker, has withdrawn some of his earlier relativist views.

8. This appears in correspondence between Professor Galassi, University of Parma and Graeme Dean as editor of Abacus.

9. It is interesting, for example, to view the correspondence lying behind virtually everything he published. For example, consider the numerous letters between Chambers and Moonitz over the contents (of primarily) ARS1 (1961)' postulates' work. The arguments for and against the propositions of ARS3 were thoroughly argued out between the two of them to the point of mutual exhaustion it seems, before they ever hit the pages of Abacus—truly a great part of the unpublished accounting literature, in that instance worthy of tribute to Moonitz and to Chambers alike. Chambers corresponded with virtually every accounting scholar of his time. Few of his contributions hit the journals without a thorough airing with those whose ideas and whose research was in focus. The same is true, of course, in respect of much of the correspondence to which Mattessich alludes; and for instance between Briloff and Chambers that shows they were common travellers in respect of their concerns with the defects in contemporary accounting practice.