The Telling Power of CCA - A New Zealand Oral History
Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 1-26, 1999
Posted: 12 Aug 2008 Last revised: 15 Aug 2008
Date Written: February 27, 1999
Abstract
This report present results of research on the failure of the inflation accounting standard in New Zealand in the early 1980s. Presentation of the results in three narratives highlight that any such research is a series of interlocking and overlapping events, and that narrative is a direct and efficient means of communicating both causal and transactional components which contributed towards the outcomes. In particular, this report examine the reasons provided by companies for non-compliance with the inflation accounting standard, compared with the views of standard setters as to why compliance was so low. The standard was later withdrawn. Isolation of the three narratives was chosen to demonstrate that it is not useful to extol an explanatory or interpretative paradigm for accounting history if it is advocated at the expense of sequential accounts of events.
Keywords: New Zealand, inflation accounting, oral history, current cost accounting
JEL Classification: M50
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation