Mattessich's Critique of Accounting: a review article

Mattessich's Critique of Accounting sums up and brings together his work over four decades in accounting theory, though with most emphasis on the period since 1970. Its publication is a significant event which constitutes a serious claim for him to be ranked among the pre-eminent accounting thinkers of this half-century. This essay does not attempt directly to evaluate that claim, but focuses on reviewing the book in some detail. One may (and, as this paper argues, should) recognise and value Mattessich's contributions as an accounting thinker without necessarily agreeing with all or even most of his philosophical positions. The paper takes the position that, for the purpose of a Critique of Accounting, a more fruitful development of his ontological and epistemological positions (following his publication of Instrumental Reasoning and Systems Methodology (Mattessich, 1978)) would have lain in the direction of the philosophy of social science—or more generally, of post-positivist and post-empiricist approaches in epistemology. These are perspectives from which Mattessich's Conditional-Normative Accounting Methodology (CoNAM), and his philosophical position as a whole, confront a number of important questions that are examined in this paper. Because of Mattessich's standing as an accounting thinker, and his book's focus on fundamental issues in accounting thought, it deserves to be considered as essential reading for all those interested in such issues.