Knowledge that Transforms

Reviews the book "Construction Accounting and Financial Management," by William E. Coombs and William J. Palmer.

Reviews the book "Accounting for Pension Costs: Current Practices in Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States."

Reviews the book "Profit Measurement During Inflation," by Y. Goldschmidt and K. Admon.

The article presents information about the book "The Evolution of Accounting in Canada," by Harvey Mann. The book presents the history of accounting and business in Canada, and its aim is to ascertain the relationship between accounting and the forces which affect it. It includes brief histories of leading Canadian companies and accounting organizations.

Reviews the book "Corporate Financial Disclosure in the UK and the USA," by George J. Benston.

This study evaluates the effectiveness of conventional and self-paced instruction and locus of control theory on student achievement, Three null hypotheses were tested: there are no significant differences on the basis of (1) method of instruction, (2) locus of control, and (3) their interaction. For one semester, 120 introductory accounting students were taught using either conventional or self-paced instruction. At the completion of the semester, and achievement test was administered. Results indicated that hypothesis (1) was not supported. Students taught using the conventional method significantly outperformed students taught using the self-paced method. Hypotheses (2) and (3) were accepted.

Innovations often fail to gain adoption by the accounting profession. A factor affecting the rate of adoption of innovations is the perceptions of innovations by individual groups within a profession. The objective of this article is to provide empirical evidence regarding the extent to which differences occur in accounting interest groups' perceptions of the need for and future rate of adoption of accounting innovations. The research evidence indicates that accounting academicians perceive a higher need for adoption and future rate of adoption of innovations. CPAs and financial executives are systematically lower on both variables, and investment analysts fall in the middle range. These findings suggest that the needs and values of the CPA and financial executive groups may be slowing the rate of adoption of accounting innovations. In summary, the findings of this research indicate that system effects are ubiquitous in the accounting profession and could be an important area for research directed toward discovering methods of affecting the rate of adoption of accounting innovations. System effects are the influences of the norms, values, and functions of a group on the behavior of the individual members of that group.

Reviews the book "Principles of Auditing," 6th ed., by Walter B. Meigs, E. John Larsen and Robert R. Meigs.

This study is based on a survey of the annual reports from 1972 to 1975 for the population of publicly held companies with more than $15 million in assets (approximately 3400 companies). The authors present evidence which supports the following three hypotheses for this population. First, systematic security risk for a company is a useful surrogate for that aspect of "audit risk" which relates to the likelihood that the company will receive a qualified audit opinion. Second, this aspect of "audit risk" is not distributed uniformly across the major auditing firms. Third, when the differences in this aspect of "audit risk" are considered, comparability does exist across the Big Eight CPA firms in the incidence of qualified audit options.

Reviews the book "Financial Accounting, An Introduction," 2nd ed., by Paul H. Walgenbach, Norman E. Dittrich and Ernest I. Hanson.