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Exploring the fundamental role of accounting
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Why is basic accounting essential?
Goizueta professors Gregory Waymire and Sudipta Basu believe that modern accounting played a significant role in the economic development of our society, and its ancient precursors likely enabled the emergence of economically complex societies. Their initial paper presenting this argument, “Recordkeeping and Human Evolution,” was published in the September 2006 issue of Accounting Horizons.
Building on their initial research, they organized a mini-conference on “The Foundations of Accounting,” held last spring semester at Goizueta Business School. More than fifty multidisciplinary researchers with an interest in the origins of accounting attended from across the United States, as well as from Canada and Australia. The purpose: “to initiate an interdisciplinary conversation on the importance of the seemingly mundane task of recordkeeping and accounting,” says Waymire.
Waymire and Basu’s research used existing archaeological findings for periods predating recorded history. They found that in every known early civilization, transactional records seem to have coincided with the emergence of complex social arrangements. “There have been only three times in the history of man that written language has been invented,” says Waymire. In each case, he suggests, the first use of this tool was for accounting. “It wasn’t to write plays; it was to keep records.”
Invited speakers from fields such as experimental economics, anthropology, neuroeconomics, development economics, and law presented papers using different methodologies—computer experiments, field experiments, ethnographies, analytical modeling, and archival data analyses. These presentations laid the groundwork for exploring more open-ended questions regarding accounting foundations. Those attending the mini-conference discussed why people began keeping records, the links between accounting and law, how norms for fairness and reciprocity differ across cultures, and why mathematicians have an interest in basic accounting matters. Early recordkeeping originated as a memory aid for transactions, but how, they ask, did it also help solve inherent difficulties in building trust in an exchange environment?
The long-range goal of the conference is to spark an ongoing conversation on the foundations of accounting, says Waymire. “The kind of research questions we’re after start with what happens in the brain when people look at exchange and how it is that they view it, the sense of fairness that they have, and how their sense of fairness can be influenced by the information that they have at their disposal.”
—Sarah Banick