Martin Emanuel Persson

The Australian accounting academic in the 1950s

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges faced by an Australian accounting academic, R. J. Chambers, in the 1950s, in breaking into the accounting research community, at that time, almost entirely located in the USA and the UK. For academics outside the networks of accounting research publication in these countries, there were significant, but not insurmountable obstacles to conducting and publishing accounting research. We examine how these obstacles could be overcome, using the notion of “trials of strength” to trace the efforts of Chambers in wrestling with intellectual issues arising from post-war inflation, acquiring accounting literature from abroad and publishing his endeavours. Design/methodology/approach – The article uses actor-network theory to provide an analytical structure for a “counter-narrative” history firmly grounded in the archives. Findings – Documents from the R. J. Chambers Archive at the University of Sydney form the empirical basis for a narrative that port...

R. J. Chambers on Securities and Obscurities: His Contribution to the British Debate on Inflation Accounting in the 1970s

This study seeks to offer an account of the British accounting inflation debate in the 1970s, from the perspective of Raymond J. Chambers and his contribution to this debate: Securities and Obscurities: A Case for Reform of the Law of Company Accounts. The purpose of this account is to trace the environmental and material circumstances that help us to understand why Chambers’ contribution to this inflation accounting debate was rejected. To create this empirical narrative, we draw on previously unpublished documents from the R. J. Chambers Archive. We use Czarniawska and Joerges’ (1996) work on the ‘travel of ideas’ as well as Mumford’s (1979) observations on accounting cycles as a theoretical framework to structure this narrative. The narrative demonstrates how factors not normally associated with the accounting research process, such as the choice of publisher, promotional material, and distribution methods, are just as important in explaining the trajectory of Chambers’ solution to inflation accounting as the ideas that he was promulgating.