This paper employs memetics to argue against the view that standardisation overwhelms the evolution of accounting. I suggest that, in an unregulated setting, accounting procedures constitute classic memes and survive according to their fitness for their environment, which is predominantly a matter of their suitability for investment decision-making. In a standardising regime, the standardising canon embodies a special kind of meme encoding ideas as actions to be imitated to realise those ideas. Evolutionary pressures and the canon develop in tandem, although (...) not necessarily synchronously.If we accept the central tenet of memetics, which is also the assumption underlying the argument challenged here, that memes emerging before regulation were responsive to evolutionary pressures, we can analyse the responsiveness of the standardising canon by examining its relationship to a counterfactual continuation of the pre-regulated regime. The degree of synchronicity is an empirical, but elusive, question and we should follow Dennett’s recommendation that we settle for the philosophical realisations we can glean from memetics.I argue that three factors are of importance in addressing the question. Accounting memes function within a dense ecology, limiting radical and destabilising change. There has been a high degree of continuity, permeability and commonality in the intellection driving development: the same thinking has influenced policy design wherever it has taken place. Finally, the principal determinant of successful adaptation did not change on the transition to standardisation and the canon and its vehicles have survived. Consequently, we can conclude that standardisation has not disrupted the development of accounting. (shrink)

This paper offers a rigorous philosophical defence for the approaches and methods of classical financial accounting research, drawn from New Pragmatism and, in particular, the ideas of Huw Price and Michael Lynch’s functional theory of truth. Such an underpinning is important because classical approaches and methods are often characterised as unscientific and lacking theoretical support. It can justify the resumption of scholarly efforts to employ classical approaches and methods to contribute to the development and refinement of accounting practice, including, and (...) especially, accounting’s conceptual framework, as part of the mainstream of the academy’s work. In addition, giving explicit attention to aspects of the functional theory of truth in the design of accounting research may improve its rigour and coherence. (shrink)

This paper argues that the metaphysics of financial performance in the conceptual framework employed by accounting standard-setters is incoherent: income and expenses cannot, as the framework holds, both be independent elements of financial statements, identified from underlying events, tested for recognition and measured by discrete acts, separately from the identification, testing and measurement of other elements and satisfy the analytical relationship between performance and position embraced by the framework. An alternative conceptualisation is proposed, under which income and expenses are part (...) of a wider system of classifying all changes in assets and liabilities, measured indirectly. This approach improves the metaphysical coherence, and thus the intellectual strength, of the framework project; while it leaves the measurement of financial performance unchanged, by emphasising the importance of classification, it invites further attention to the presentation of financial performance, with the potential for improving the usefulness of disclosures. (shrink)