Reviews the book " Foundations of Accounting for Managerial Control," by Lawrence H. Malchman and Albert Slavin.

Abstract It is difficult to consider the graduate curriculum entirely apart from the undergraduate curriculum. The graduate curriculum must allow considerable adjustment to the needs of individual students. This is even more true of graduate students than of the undergraduates in view of their greater diversity of background. Applicants to the graduate school will range all the way from the man who was an accounting major as an undergraduate, to the liberal arts graduate who majored in mathematics or English or to the law school product of twenty years ago. Some hopeful graduate students, therefore, may need to concentrate on "broadening" their training. Others who have had their share of this diversification will desire and will need to devote most of their time to accounting. Of one thing one can be reasonably certain about the graduate students: few, indeed, will have moved very far in their undergraduate days toward developing their capacity in communication and in independent, critical thought. In these modern times it seems students just cannot get time for those fundamentals in the first sixteen years of training in school.

Abstract The Executive Committee of the American Accounting Association reactivated the committee on cost concepts and standards for the year 1951. The Executive Committee hoped that in reestablishing this Committee, the groundwork laid by previous committees would be carried forward to the benefit of the Association and the profession of accounting as a whole. The 1951 Committee made an intensive exploratory study of the possibility of setting forth principles, concepts and standards of accounting. As an approach to offering positive guidance to current cost accounting problems, the Committee felt that this afforded the best opportunity to be of service at the present time. As a consequence, major stress of the 1951 Committee is upon cost concepts and related business decisions and policy and, to a lesser extent, upon principles or standards of cost accounting. Cost accounting is a tool of management. In so far as it aids management in the preparation of general financial statements, it supplies data, which may be used eventually as a guide to the overall efficiency of an organization, the relative efficiency of a firm to other firms in an industry, or the relative profitableness of present pursuits of management as contrasted to alternative opportunities.