Reviews the book "Normative Audit Control for On-Line/Real-Time Systems: A Feasibility Study," by Maxwell E. Aiken, Kevin G. Hulme and Phillip J. Grouse.

This article presents a comment on the study of some observations on student values and their implications for accounting education in the U.S. If accounting majors are less concerned with wisdom and beauty than other students it may be incumbent upon accounting educators to raise the consciousness level of their students. This could be done by pointing out the scholarly background of accounting and the infinite complexities of designing a useful and reliable method of measuring economic and financial transactions.

Reviews the book "The Accounting Response to Changing Prices: Experimentation With Four Models."

Reviews the book 'Duties and Liabilities of the CPA,' by Denzil Y. Causey Jr.

A participant observation methodology is employed in this paper to investigate the management strategy of a large public accounting firm. The author directly observed partners and managers of an audit practice office going about their daily tasks over a 3-month period. A descriptive model of the management strategy was developed from the observed matrix of daily interactions. The results indicate that there are three components to the management strategy: Doing, Representing and Being. Doing is defined as those activities which the firm undertakes to maintain and improve its relationship with its clients. Representing is defined as those activities which the firm undertakes to maintain and improve its relationships with outside parties other than clients. Being is defined as the image of the firm. The three components work together to manage the environment in which the public accounting firm operates.

The article focuses on the differences in value systems between university students in the United States. These are university students who are interested in pursuing accounting as a career choice and those students who are not interested in such a career choice. Differences in value systems are tested using the Rokeach Survey of Values. Significant differences are found on these eight variables: a comfortable life; a world of beauty (negative); wisdom (negative); ambitious; clean; imaginative (negative); family security; and responsible. The eight differences have construct validity based upon prior research in this area. However, results are inconclusive as to whether accounting majors in fact, do, have different value systems from other university students. Anthropologists have found that even the most primitive cultures have elaborate ethical systems which delineate proper and improver behavior. Throughout most of history the study of values was dominated by the religious leaders of a culture.

In this paper, we use the investment fraud of Bernard Madoff to inquire into the production of trust in the context of financial markets. Drawing upon empirical data related to U.S. individual investors (interviews and letters) as well as documentary material, we investigate the mechanisms through which investing with Madoff came to be seen as a trustworthy investment opportunity. We show how different types of information contributed to construct Bernard Madoff as a trustworthy investment manager and how Madoff avoided meeting demands for accountability by manipulating investors in face-to-face encounters. We shed particular light on the role of institution-based forms of trust which play a critical role in facilitating economic exchanges. More specifically, we suggest that the Madoff case illuminates how the provision of information can lead to an “illusion of trustworthiness” that is difficult to escape for investors. An element of such illusion, we suggest, is inherent to the functioning of financial markets more generally.

Richard W. Baker, Jr., Leon T. Kendall, Walter C. Nelson, J. Charles Partee, David Fritz, Harry S. Schwartz, Changing Character of the Real Estate Mortgage Markets: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 19, No. 2, Part 1: Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, Boston, Massachusetts, December 27-29, 1963 (May, 1964), pp. 321-333