Accounting and the Influence of Economics at LSE

Napier, Christopher J.

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-58274-4_3

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Information on Basil's early life comes from his son Adam's book Exodus to Africa (Yamey, 2015). More information about Baxter and Plant is available in Napier (2011Napier ( , 2019…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Vale Basil S. Yamey

Napier

2021

Accounting History

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Basil Selig Yamey, who died on 9 November 2020 at the age of 101 years, was a pioneer of historical accounting research, contributing nearly a hundred books, book chapters, journal articles and other publications on accounting history. To put this into context, Basil wrote a further 150 publications in applied economics, which was his main teaching and research activity through his academic career.Basil was born on 4 May 1919 in Cape Town, the third son of Solomon Yamey (originally Jami) and Leah Yamey (née Halperin). His parents were born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, and had emigrated to South Africa before the First World War. Basil grew up in Tulbagh, a town about 70 miles north of Cape Town, where his father owned a general store. He attended the local High School, gaining the highest marks in the whole of South Africa in the 1935 matriculation examinations. Basil then took the Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Cape Town. Among his teachers was William T Baxter, the Professor of Accounting. Although Basil originally planned to become an articled clerk after graduation, with a view to becoming a chartered accountant, Baxter persuaded Basil to travel to London and begin a PhD under the supervision of Arnold Plant, the Professor of Business Administration at the London School of Economics (LSE). Basil arrived in England on the Capetown Castle on 17 February 1939 and began work on his PhD at the LSE shortly after. 1 Basil's thesis title was 'Shareholders, accounting and the law', and he made a substantial start on the thesis. His research formed the basis of his first scholarly contributions, a pamphlet for the Accounting Research Association The Functional Development of Double-Entry Bookkeeping (Yamey, 1940) and a study of British dividend law (Yamey, 1941). His research made extensive use of the collection of historical accounting treatises in the library of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). However, with the coming of the Second World War, it was not practical to continue work on the thesis, and Basil returned to South Africa and joined that country's air force. Following the war, Basil began a teaching career, initially at Rhodes University College (now Rhodes University) and then working with Will Baxter at the University of Cape Town as Senior Lecturer in Commerce. When Will moved to the LSE in 1947, he persuaded Basil to join him, and, except for a short period in Canada, Basil spent the rest of his academic career at the LSE, being promoted to Professor of Economics in 1960. 2 Basil's historical accounting research is diverse, though three main trends can be discerned. First, Basil challenged the argument that double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) was a necessary factor for the development of capitalism. His most cited accounting history publication 'Scientific bookkeeping and the rise of capitalism' (Yamey, 1949), which was based on published textbooks on DEB and on

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“…Information on Basil's early life comes from his son Adam's book Exodus to Africa (Yamey, 2015). More information about Baxter and Plant is available in Napier (2011Napier ( , 2019…”

Section: Declaration Of Conflicting Interestsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 1. Information on Basil’s early life comes from his son Adam’s book Exodus to Africa (Yamey, 2015). More information about Baxter and Plant is available in Napier (2011, 2019). The passenger list showing Basil’s arrival at Southampton on 17 February 1939 is available at https://www.ancestry.co.uk/imageviewer/collections/1518/images/30807_A001182-00207. …”

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Vale Basil S. Yamey

Napier

2021

Accounting History

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“…9 9 The membership at the ICAEW included Edey, who was still a strong advocate of an economics‐based approach to accounting and influential in policy and government circles (Napier 2018). …”

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Words and Numbers: Financialization and Accounting Standard Setting in the United Kingdom

Chahed

2020

Contemporary Accting Res

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How is it possible that British policymakers resisted market‐based measurement for decades while financial economic concepts of decision making and valuation still gained widespread acceptance as a justification for accounting standard setting? This study introduces the concept of “technologies of financialization” to develop the theorizing of the rise of finance in the domain of accounting. Based on a genealogical history of narrative reporting in the United Kingdom, it demonstrates how references to qualitative reporting techniques helped to address recurring crises of measurement from 1969 to 1993, and ultimately contributed to the practical acceptance of market‐based measurement in the UK standard‐setting context. The data are interpreted through a cultural economy framework that directs attention to the power of referring to financial reporting as a combination of words and numbers in sustaining its theoretical redefinition “from below”—that is, by relating it to the experience of practicing accountants rather than accounting theory. As a technology of financialization, narrative reporting made financial economic ideals of market‐based measurement, decision usefulness, and future orientation appear operable in a real‐life reporting context. Whenever measurement reached its practical limits, narratives were relied on to explain the impact of price‐level changes, frame economic decisions, and relate unobservable future cash flows to present‐day strategies and resources. The insight into how narrative reporting practices have been laced into the reasoning of capital markets for over 40 years is timely because it illustrates that narratives can also play a more encompassing role and drive the turn toward wider corporate accountability on social and environmental impacts while hard measurements in this area are still being figured out.

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Constructing Economic Science

Tribe¹

2021

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Constructing Economic Science demonstrates how an existing public discourse, political economy, was transformed in the early twentieth century into a new university discipline: economics. This change in location brought about a restructuring of economic knowledge. Finance, student numbers, curricula, teaching, new media, and the demands of employment all played their part in shaping economics as it is known today. It was broadly accepted in the later nineteenth century that industrialising economies required the skilled and specialised workforce that universities could provide. Advocacy for the teaching of commercial subjects was widespread and international. In Cambridge, Alfred Marshall was alone in arguing that economics, not commerce, provided the most suitable training for the administration and business of the future; and in 1903 he founded the first three-year undergraduate economics programme. This was by no means the end of the story, however. What economics was, how Marshall thought it should be taught, had by the 1920s become contested, and in Britain the London School of Economics gained dominance in defining the new science. By the 1930s, American universities had already moved on from undergraduate to graduate teaching, whereas in Britain university education remained focussed upon undergraduate education. At the same time, public policy was reformulated in terms of economic means and ends—relating to postwar reconstruction, employment, and social welfare—and international economics became American economics. This study charts the conditions that initially shaped the “science” of economics, providing in turn a foundation for an understanding of the way in which this new language itself subsequently transformed public policy.

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Accounting and the Influence of Economics at LSE

Cited by 14 publications

References 65 publications

Vale Basil S. Yamey

Vale Basil S. Yamey

Words and Numbers: Financialization and Accounting Standard Setting in the United Kingdom

Constructing Economic Science

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