Reviews the book "Financial Accounting Theory II: Issues and Controversies," edited by Thomas F. Keller and Stephen A. Zeff.

In the article, the author presents an analysis of the paper by John P. Fertakis, which attempts to draw conclusions with respect to accounting on the basis of unrelated or only indirectly related studies in the behavioral sciences. According to the author, his paper merely contains several examples of what may become even more prevalent in accounting. Accounting research frequently has its tentacles extended into the research efforts of scientists in the fields of psychology, sociology, economics, statistics, operations research, management science, etc. In so doing, accountants are looking to others for answers in order to avoid the dirty and painstakingly slow, expensive, and methodical means by which empirical evidence can be conceived and nurtured in their own studies. But this outside empirical evidence often flounders like a fish out of water when plucked from the environment in which it was generated. In addition, accountants must heed the cautions of scientists who generated and/or analyzed the cited empirical evidence. In supplying more information in annual reports, accounts are thereby making it possible for users to make finer distinctions between more companies. Professor Fertakis should note that his suggested "seven items" for a standard report are not one-dimensional at all.

Reviews the book "DR Scott Memorial Lectures," edited by Orace Johnson.

The staff of the Air Force Accounting and Finance School decided to explore the use of programmed instruction in teaching certain basic accounting procedures to their young trainees. This school was interested in investigating programmed instruction in terms of its effectiveness and as a possible means of reducing the required training time while maintaining the desired quality of learning. The purpose of this article is to describe the study designed to evaluate the programmed materials developed. While this course was more technical in nature than the modern college accounting course, still as a rather well defined controlled experiment, the experiment should also be of interest to college instructors. This study was conducted at a Department of Air Force technical training school, which has the responsibility of training personnel in the area of governmental accounting procedures. A programmed textbook was developed specifically for the experimental unit of instruction and consisted of two volumes and an Answer Panel. It was written only after the objectives of the unit had been formulated in student behavioral terms and the criterion test developed.

Accounting professors, and a number of other business administration professors as well, have argued that a solid background in accounting is necessary for effective corporate decision making. By implication and on occasion explicitly, they indicate that top management would be more successful and produce higher profits, if men with considerable accounting training were more numerous at the very highest levels. This article reports on several studies that investigate this hypothesis. The medium of investigation is a simulation of top management decision-making in manufacturing industry. That accounting training is not an essential factor in management success, at least within the manufacturing sector, seems inescapable. Prior research has indicated that intelligence may be a factor in game performance; steps were taken to ensure that differences on this factor could not influence the results. Thus, as with homogeneity of major, the objective was to eliminate a possible contaminating variable which might become confounded with the experimental variable accounting training and make unambiguous interpretation of results impossible.

Reviews the book "Business Combinations: Planning and Action," 1st ed., by Arthur R. Wyatt and Donald E. Kieso.

Reviews the book "Management Accounting: Text and Cases," 4th ed., by Robert N. Anthony.

Reviews the book "The Nature and Stages of Accounting Development in Latin America," by Edward L. Elliott.

A subtle confusion seems to have arisen in some recent attempts to apply the technique of input-output analysis to the activities of the individual enterprise. This is because the analysis was developed originally as an econometric technique for macro-economic purposes. Essentially, econometrics views a system as a black box whose real workings can only be approximated. Thus, national input-output accounts are prepared by dividing the economy into meaningful sectors and attempting to reconstruct the income and expenditure of each sector, in currency terms, analyzed amongst all sectors of the economy. Expressing this data in matrix form and then dividing the various inputs by the total output at selling price of the relevant sector then arrive at so-called technical coefficients. Standard costs are built upwards from the lowest basic operations, while econometric parameters are broken downwards from aggregated material; standard-cost data do purport to illustrate the operation of the system, while econometric parameters are just weightings which happen to explain the right-hand side of the equations in terms of the selected variables.