Accounting Horizons American Accounting Association

Vol. 27, No. 4 DOI: 10.2308/acch-10361

2013
pp. 895–907

MEMORIAL

Anthony G. Hopwood: Academic Iconoclast

and Entrepreneur 1944–2010
Jacob G. Birnberg, Michael Bromwich, and John Roberts

INTRODUCTION

A
nthony Hopwood was born on May 18, 1944 in Stoke-on-Trent in England and died on
May 8, 2010 in Marlow, England. He was a pioneer in behavioral accounting research. He
contributed to that area with both his research and as the founding editor of Accounting,
Organizations and Society (AOS), the leading behavioral accounting research journal, the reason for
which he likely is best well known by scholars internationally, both in and outside of accounting.
He held that position for 35 years. As Zeff (2008, 3) described it, in his remarks introducing
Anthony at his Hall of Fame induction:
He founded a scholarly journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society, which almost
immediately became a vehicle of the front rank for behavioral accounting research
worldwide. Papers published in AOS went well beyond cognitive psychology to
encompass social psychology, organization theory, sociology, cultural anthropology,
history, politics and philosophy. He encouraged and published a wide range of work in
behavioral accounting research that might otherwise have had no respectable home.
As its title indicates, AOS over time extended its scope to consider the intertwining of accounting
within and between organizations and with societies widely defined.
Anthony’s other accomplishments were numerous. He received the Lifetime Contribution
Award from the American Accounting Association’s Accounting, Organizations, and Behavior
Section in 1996 and from its Management Accounting Section in 2009. He was selected as the
British Accounting Association’s Distinguished Academic of the year in 1998. He also received
five honorary doctorates from European universities and numerous other awards. In addition to his
academic achievements and responsibilities, he served on numerous panels in the United Kingdom
and elsewhere in Europe, including a term as chair of HRH Prince Charles’ Foundation for the Built
Environment.

Jacob G. Birnberg is a Professor Emeritus at University of Pittsburgh, Michael Bromwich is a Professor

Emeritus at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and John Roberts is a Professor at The
University of Sydney.

We are grateful to Professor Stephen A. Zeff for comments on an earlier draft.

Published Online: December 2013

Corresponding author: Michael Bromwich
Email: m.bromwich@lse.ac.uk
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For his secondary education, Anthony went to Hanley High School, in Stoke-on-Trent, which
had the expectation of sending students following the traditional science/physics track to Oxford or
Cambridge Universities. Presaging his later career, Anthony shifted his studies to a social science
track even though this added another year to his exams (Hopwood 1988) and then applied to
London School of Economics (LSE), despite the urging of his headmaster to consider Oxford or
Cambridge, because of his sympathies with the views of the Webbs, who founded LSE, along with
George Bernard Shaw (Hopwood 2008a). His wide-ranging interests at this time were reflected in
his becoming an authority on Heraldry. His interest in accounting was stimulated by an accountant
uncle who suggested accountancy as a possible career to him as a poor working class boy. Even at
this time he saw ‘‘accounting as being a problematic phenomenon, as being related to wider
economic and social factors rather than just technique’’ (Mennicken 2008, 21).
At this time, the accounting degree at LSE was a fairly wide one in the social sciences,
focusing on technical accounting but from a strong economic base. It reinforced Anthony’s view
that accounting needed to be explored from a variety of dimensions. His very good performance at
LSE generated a wish for further academic study.
After his Ph.D. (awarded 1971) from The University of Chicago, he returned to England in
1970 to a lectureship at the Manchester Business School (MBS) until 1973. This was an exciting
time at MBS, where they tended to take a holistic view of management. Here Anthony widened his
perspective by becoming familiar with the anthropological and sociological approaches that would
inform his thinking throughout the rest of his life. This made him, at the time, a rather unusual
accounting researcher, as these interests were generally shared only by a few Scandinavian
accounting researchers. He then went to the Administrative Staff College, a rather unhappy time, as
the college was strongly teaching oriented. After three years he moved to the Oxford Centre for
Management Studies as a Professorial Fellow, where multidisciplinary research was strongly
encouraged and allowed him to build up a team of like-minded researchers. In 1978 he joined
London Business School for seven years. Here his accounting colleagues were fairly traditional in
their approaches and did not share his research interests, but he enjoyed being director of the
Doctoral Program since it gave him the opportunity to be involved with a wide range of disciplines.
For ten years, from 1985, he was Ernst & Young Professor of International Accounting at LSE
until he returned to Oxford. At LSE his fresh approach to subjects was evident in his teaching of
international accounting, which rejected the then popular focus of looking at the differences
between accounting in different countries. Rather, his concern was to consider how the economic,
social, legal, and regulatory systems in countries interacted with their accounting regimes—now a
commonly used approach. He was also important in forming LSE accounting’s view that many
disciplines can illuminate accounting, providing that researchers are properly trained in their
discipline(s), as reflected even now in the wide variety of backgrounds of researchers at LSE. His
final academic home was the University of Oxford, which he joined in 1995, where his roles
included being Dean of the new Saı̈d Business School for seven years.1 There he continued to
innovate by emphasizing the need to invest in the School buildings, create research centers charged
with taking practice into the core business teaching, and encourage new approaches to management
by recruiting strong researchers who were well grounded in disciplines other than management. By
using a ‘‘softly, softly’’ approach, he was successful at raising donations and in university politics.
This skill and much determination was needed when he and Michael Earl, as Dean of a college that
had responsibility for executive education within the university, took on the slow-moving

1
The comments of Michael Earl, in correspondence, were very helpful in writing briefly about some of Anthony’s
Oxford experiences.

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university and its byzantine administrative system to bring executive education into the Saı̈d
School: a major endeavor (Bradshaw 2005).
He may best be described as an accountant whose contributions defied traditional boundaries,
often utilizing novel approaches. These contributions were international and, at base, impacted on
research and researchers across multiple continents. They also crossed typical disciplinary
boundaries. He undertook research in, and was respected by, researchers specializing in such
diverse areas as economic history, organization theory, sociology, management theory, and human
resources.

RESEARCH
Anthony wrote four books, edited 12 collections, and wrote over 80 articles, including some
which are among the highest cited among those not in the mainstream of accounting. Below we
focus on a few of the most significant of his articles to give a flavor of his research contribution.
Anthony entered the Ph.D. program at the Graduate School of Business of The University of
Chicago (now the Booth School) in the late 1960s when accounting research was undergoing
significant, and what would become, monumental changes. He found a faculty supportive of change
and a cohort of fellow graduate students like Ray Ball, Bill Beaver, Philip Brown, Joel Demski, and
Ross Watts also contributing to an environment rich with new ideas.
In this environment Anthony developed his own alternative view of the nature of what
accounting research should be, quite independent of, and different from, the predominantly market-
and economics-based research in favor at Chicago. The essence of Anthony’s view of the role of
research in accounting was that it should focus on the ever-shifting nature of accounting practice.
He later articulated this view in his 2006 Presidential Scholar Address at a plenary session at the
AAA annual meeting, where he stressed that accounting always has been a dynamic discipline
adapting to ever-changing times (Hopwood 2007).

Origin of His View

In his two autobiographical essays, Anthony describes his view of how accounting research
evolved in Chicago. He entered the Chicago program intending to major in financial accounting and
economics, the flavor du jour at that time. He attributed his shift from the technical orientation to
the action-oriented approach to a required Organization Theory seminar taught by Paul Goodman
(Hopwood 1988, 2008a). Goodman undoubtedly introduced Anthony to the academic literature on
organizations across a variety of disciplines, especially communication. Anthony’s research can be
divided into two periods. The first drew primarily on his dissertation and the non-accounting
influences of his graduate work at Chicago. While it represented a controversial break from the
capital markets and the analytical modeling research of this period, its method was different from
most behavioral accounting research (BAR) at that time, although it clearly still was influenced by
the then popular topic in BAR research—the budgeting process. The second period represented a
clean break from what was then the popular view of the role of accounting in the management of
organizations. His views then, and those that would characterize his subsequent work, were
articulated most clearly in Burchell et al. (1980) (see below).

The Initial Decade: A Formative Period

The focus of the first decade of Anthony’s career was concerned with the same issues of
interest to the then ‘‘new’’ behavioral accounting research. However, he asserted the importance of
field studies, as well as laboratory experiments, and undertook the first such study in accounting—a
seminal change. It reflected his character that he remained determined to use this approach even in

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the face of great opposition (Hopwood 2008b, 22). His view at the time was best articulated in the
introduction to his monograph, Accounting and Human Behaviour (Hopwood 1976, xiii; emphasis
added):
Despite the mass of technical procedures and detailed financial reports, accounting is
fundamentally concerned with managerial actions in human organizations. It therefore is
encouraging that the accountant’s task is increasingly being viewed in terms of the
contribution he can make to the overall management of the enterprise rather than in terms
of the mere procedures by which he tried to achieve his own more limited financial
objectives.
In this monograph (Hopwood 1976) he outlined what he saw as the two possible foci of
accounting research. One, the ‘‘technical approach,’’ is concerned with developing the techniques
through which accounting can provide the most appropriate and precise set of measurement
procedures. The other, which he labeled ‘‘accounting in use’’ (AiU), is concerned with studying the
role(s) accounting plays as a means of communication in the managing of the organization and, in a
broader view, in society.

Accounting and Communication

His dissertation research and his work through the remainder of the decade were primarily
concerned with accounting and organizations: what is the role of accounting data in linking the
actions of managers to the goals of the organization? How are the internal data generated by the
organization utilized by managers in the choices they make? These questions were the central
theme of his dissertation, related work (Hopwood 1972, 1973, 1974), and the monograph
(Hopwood 1976). He held the view that ‘‘accounting was an organizational based phenomenon and
needed to be studied as such’’ (Hopwood 1988, xix). His concern was with the complexity of the
environment faced by managers and what he believed would be the diversity rather than unity of
managers’ resulting responses to accounting data and our need to understand these responses
(Hopwood 1988). Given this view, he chose to undertake a field-based study for his dissertation. It
was his belief that you cannot replicate the complexity of the organization’s environment in a
laboratory setting, a view that he maintained throughout his career. The complexity of the natural
setting required a richness that only a field-based project could provide. This was a significant
departure from the accounting research being undertaken at Chicago. Fortunately, he received
support for his project from his co-chairs, George Sorter in accounting and Richard Hoffman, a
social psychologist.
The unusual nature of his project was reinforced by his difficulty in finding a site for his study,
despite the interceding of several members of The University of Chicago faculty both in and outside
of accounting (Hopwood 1988). The delay that resulted from the lack of access would have
discouraged a researcher less dedicated to his project and likely resulted in utilizing a laboratory
study for his dissertation. He later indicated that, had he been a faculty member at the time, he could
not have afforded to allocate the time he did to the project (personal communication).

The Dissertation
The dissertation (Hopwood 1972) is his single most important contribution in this period and
the basis for the other publications. In the dissertation he states what is, and would be, the basic
premise underlying his subsequent research: it is not enough to understand ‘‘accounting in theory’’
(AiT), but we must understand ‘‘accounting in use’’ (AiU). Until we understand how managers use
the system, we will not fully/truly understand how (in)effective the system is. AiT is concerned
with the development of normative accounting systems, usually based on economic or operations

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research models intended to affect the users’ behavior or influence their decisions in particular
ways. His argument against AiT was that the organizations (and their managers) were operating in
environments too complex and uncertain for the accountant to develop a universal AiT appropriate
for all settings. It is these factors that make the accounting systems we develop less than they are
thought/expected/intended to be. This leads to behaviors inconsistent with the organization’s goals
that BAR and Organizational Behavior research already had identified by 1970 (e.g., Argyris 1952).
To resolve these issues, he believed we needed to understand the accounting system in situ. This, in
turn, leads to developing possible solutions to improve the system. The process essentially is
adaptive and specific to a particular situation. It can be viewed as a work-in-progress that must be
adapted to reflect both new insights into the setting and changes in the environment.
Anthony was fortunate in his research site. Inland Steel Company at that time had two
characteristics likely to support Anthony’s belief in AiU. First, the steel industry in the late 1960s
was encountering foreign competition, thus adding to its environmental uncertainty. Second, the
accountants and management were themselves quite concerned about the efficacy of the existing
accounting system (Hopwood 1973). Taken together, these two factors made Inland Steel an ideal
site for Anthony to test his belief in AiU. Had it failed at Inland Steel, it was likely not to be
relevant anywhere.
The dissertation made two contributions to the development of BAR. More generally, it
illustrated the valuable insights that can be obtained from the systematic study of the budgetary
behavior in a single firm. In addition, the development of management styles as a way of
identifying the manner in which the superiors did (or did not) utilize the budgetary data to control
their subordinates and, in turn, the response of those subordinates in evaluating their subordinates,
has provided a useful classification scheme. From the data collected in questionnaires that the
managers filled out, he developed four ‘‘management styles.’’ These were Budget Constrained (BC)
(only concerned with meeting budget); Profit Constrained (PC) (only concerned with costs);
Budget and Profit Constrained (BP) (both included); Non-Accounting (NA) (neither included).
He found that managers who felt that their evaluation relied on making the budget (BC and
BP), reported more job stress and generally perceived their job situation and their relationship with
their superior and peers to be the least satisfactory (Hopwood 1972, 1974). These differences were
greatest on the dimensions related to the manager’s relationship with their superior. Those
experiencing a PC or NA style reported a much better relationship with their superiors. These
results may be driven by the differences in the managers’ perception of the extent to which the
superior uses the budget in evaluating them (30 percent) and the degree to which they thought it
should be used (11 percent) (Hopwood 1973, 209–210). With the dissertation, Anthony
accomplished what he set out to show. Data collected on site were richer and provided very
different insights than might have been found in a laboratory. Would one initially have
hypothesized the differing management approaches? If an experiment were run, would experienced
participants in a controlled environment develop the same styles as found at Inland Steel? While we
have no idea what changes, if any, were made in Inland Steel’s accounting system, Anthony clearly
identified possible changes, thereby supporting the AiU argument over the traditional budget
control (AiT) approach.

The Monograph: Accounting and Human Behaviour

The monograph represented an effort to reach a wider audience for his view of the direction
BAR should take. The monograph ‘‘is a reflection of a developing interest in the human and social
aspects of accounting . . . More than anything else, it aims to show why attempts to deal with
accounting matters in isolation from their human context must, of necessity, run into difficulty’’
(Hopwood 1976, xv).

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The contribution of the monograph was twofold. First, it provided a reference volume for those
interested in BAR. He discussed participation and decision making, and he even closed with a
chapter that discussed the use of external accounting reports. Second, and more important, in
Chapter 1 he offered his view of the role accounting plays in contexts beyond the individual—the
focus of most BAR up to that time. He expanded the potential areas to be studied beyond
individuals to include groups, organizations per se, and society and the environment. In this way he
attempted to move BAR’s boundaries beyond what he had experienced while at Chicago
(Hopwood 1976, 5, Figure 1.1).

HIS RESEARCH PHILOSOPHY

It was in the 1980 AOS paper titled ‘‘The Roles of Accounting in Organizations and Society’’
(Burchell et al. 1980) that Anthony’s research agenda received possibly its most prominent and
influential exposition. It is a paper that still surprises, because the authors readily acknowledged that
they were offering a new view of accounting. The paper began with the assertion that accounting
was ‘‘no longer seen as a mere assembly of calculative routines,’’ and then asked: ‘‘Why should
accounting have grown in complexity and significance? What have been the underlying pressures
for its growth and development? Just what roles has it come to serve in organizations and society?
And why?’’ (Burchell et al. 1980, 6.)
The paper first recalled some of what they called the ‘‘core of functional claims and pretensions
of accounting,’’ which they identify as the provision of ‘‘relevant information for decision making,’’
the achievement of a ‘‘rational allocation of resources,’’ and the maintenance of institutional
‘‘accountability’’ and ‘‘stewardship’’ (Burchell et al. 1980, 9–10). A similar functionalist or
taken-for-granted claim is associated with the claims of the then influential contingency theorists, in
which accounting is seen to ‘‘fit’’ to the environmental situation of the organization even if ‘‘such
contingent designs’’ are in part made objective by the very accounting systems which they are
supposed to explain. The paper then subjects these taken-for-granted truths to closer inspection.
They are seen as providing a ‘‘normative structure for accounting thought’’: statements of what
accounting is and ought to be about that promote and guide the reform of practice. However, many
of these functional claims made for accounting are argued to have emerged at a considerable
distance from accounting practice: in professional institutes, the state, by regulators, and in the
academy itself, where economics and administrative theory are held to have been particularly
important. The authors argued that ‘‘the roles that have been attributed to accounting may tell us a
great deal about how people have come to see accounting, the influences on accounting discourse
and the bases from which people have sought to publicly influence accounting. However, that is not
to say that they are descriptive of practice’’ (Burchell et al. 1980, 11; emphasis added).
On this basis the paper goes on to review the then small number of studies of actual accounting
practice and the ways in which their findings readily disturbed the functional logic of conventional
accounting truth. Studies of the use of financial accounting information in investment decision
making suggest that the usefulness of information is determined not in advance, but by its context
of use, and that accounting information is the product not just of technical, but institutional and
political processes of huge complexity. Similarly, in relation to management accounting practices,
the paper points to the symbolic rather than technical nature of its use, the influence of the
organizational contexts and uses to which accounting is put, the political processes which are both
shaped and served by information, and the tenuous relationship between accounting and
performance. These still limited studies of actual practice, the authors suggest, ‘‘are enough to
question the descriptive accuracy of many of the functional imperatives that are claimed on behalf
of both financial and management accounting systems’’ (Burchell et al. 1980, 13).

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The strategy of the argument is to show how accounting is not what it is assumed to be and,
thus, to reveal our ignorance of actual practice.
This then serves to identify the task that characterized most of Anthony’s work: building a new
understanding of accounting based on a close study of practice in context. The work in Burchell et
al. (1980) was tentative and self-consciously incomplete, inviting others to join in the excitement of
these new lines of enquiry. The assumed usefulness of accounting information to rational decision
making and organizational control is disturbed by a still relevant set of distinctions between
accounting as an ‘‘answer machine,’’ ‘‘learning machine,’’ and an ‘‘ammunition machine’’ through
which interested parties ‘‘seek to promote their own particular positions’’ and ‘‘legitimize and justify
actions that already have been decided upon.’’ In contrast to the neutral and universal interests
assumed by functional logics, and against the ideal of accounting as the servant of rational decision
making, as an ‘‘ammunition machine,’’ accounting is seen to serve particular interested positions
and values. In this way, accounting begins to be seen and described as an organizational
phenomenon serving to shape interests that it then legitimizes and rationalizes; the ideal of
rationality gives way to the reality of post hoc rationalization.
The paper also observes how computational practices, and associated formalization and
objectification, have increasingly intruded into areas that were formerly left to management
discretion and judgment—investment appraisal, budgeting, production, and inventory control—-
creating new forms of organizational segmentation and new visibilities and targets for managerial
intervention. Similar changes are observed in relation to the growing role of accounting in relation
to wider social institutions, where it both structures interests while projecting a particular version of
rationality and rational action. Accounting is seen here as both reflective and enabling of the
construction of society as we know it.
These preliminary hints at an alternative understanding of accounting, as not just technical but
also social and organizational, lead the authors back to their key thesis:
Until recently scholars interested in accounting have been seemingly content to accept the
ends which have been claimed on its behalf, focusing their efforts on the further refinement
of the craft. We do not necessarily criticise such an orientation, but we would claim that a
case can also be made for the study of accounting as a social and organisational
phenomenon to complement the more prevalent analyses which operate within the
accounting context. (Burchell et al. 1980, 22)
By defining the boundaries of a new approach to accounting research, the 1980 paper also
defined the broad contours of a research agenda that would subsequently begin to be populated by a
whole new generation of accounting researchers, who would go on to build their own careers in the
new spaces for inquiry delineated. Here AOS and its growing reputation as one of the pre-eminent
outlets for accounting research, itself played a key institutional role. However, both within its pages
and beyond, Anthony continued to give the lead in defining a research agenda that would allow us
to better understand the multiple institutional contexts in which accounting practice plays an
increasingly pervasive and important constitutive role. In this way in his subsequent writings,
Anthony repeatedly both led and enabled the development of particular areas of research which
‘‘analyze and interpret accounting in the contexts in which it operates’’ (1983, 303).
The range of Anthony’s subsequent research interests was truly remarkable. Reporting, audit
and the auditing industry, the profession, financial accounting, management accounting, the public
sector, standard setting and harmonization, and the environment—each viewed through the
explicitly historical lens of practices that are permanently in the process of becoming, as he often
said in conversation, what ‘‘they are not’’ and occupying spaces where ‘‘accounting was not.’’ One
key resource, or at least inspiration for this work, was perhaps Foucault’s archaeological and
genealogical method as a way to understand ‘‘the conditions of possibility’’ of present practices.

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One of the most frequent metaphors that Anthony uses is that of ‘‘intertwining’’ as a way to insist
that it is simply impossible to understand accounting absent an exploration of the institutional
context, which both shapes and is itself shaped by accounting practices.

Later Work
Here we will content ourselves with two brief examples of Anthony’s subsequent work. The
first concerns the use that Anthony made of McKendrick’s (1960) work on Josiah Wedgewood.
Anthony drew on this example in at least two papers —‘‘The Archaeology of Accounting Systems’’
(Hopwood 1987) and ‘‘Accounting Calculation and the Shifting Sphere of the Economic’’
(Hopwood 1992)—perhaps Wedgewood appealed to his ascetic, as well as accounting tastes. The
Depression of 1772 had brought the expansion of Wedgewood’s business to a halt, and his
correspondence with Bentley, his business partner in London, documented his struggle to
understand what was happening in the business. He was fearful of raising the prices of larger pots
and was struggling to understand the expenses associated with their production. In one telling of
this story, Anthony included Wedgewood’s discovery of the sunk and marginal costs associated
with large-scale production, and pointed to the new potentials for organization that this created. In
the other version, the ‘‘extravagance and dissipation’’ of the chief clerk was discovered to be one of
the root causes of the problems Wedgewood faced. But the source of Anthony’s fascination with
this example is to be discerned in his comment that:
There has been no easy relationship between the idea of costing and a specific program of
intervention in the organization conducted in the name of that idea. One was not a mere
reflection of the other. Costs had to be constructed rather than merely revealed. An
organizational economy in a domain of accounting facts had to be forged painstakingly
rather than merely exposed. (Hopwood 1992, 134)
Thanks to Wedgewood’s correspondence, a vital moment in the ‘‘difficult and laborious’’ task of the
making of accounting was captured and could be told.
The second illustration of Anthony at work comes from an extended introduction to a special
issue of AOS in 2009 (Hopwood 2009a) on carbon trading. Anthony had a particular interest in this
area of research, given his recent involvement in the work of HRH The Prince of Wales’
Accounting for Sustainability Project. In 2006, the Prince appointed Anthony as Chairman of the
Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, and he quickly got involved in the accounting for
sustainability project. Anthony began by observing accounting’s growing involvement in
considerations of environmental issues, if only in the ways ‘‘complex assessments and calculations
need to be involved in the appraisal of alternative ways forward.’’ He was acutely aware of how
prevailing approaches to costing, project appraisal, and discounting were themselves part of the
problem, but also was aware that the adequacy of prevailing assumptions was now being
questioned. He was also acutely conscious of the tensions between the ethical concerns of the
environmentalists and the values of the market place, which inform its embrace of carbon trading.
Anthony pointed to this as just one example of an intriguing area for further research into the inter-
relationship between calculative approaches and value cultures.
Given his fine eye for accounting detail, Anthony was particularly scathing of the ways in
which the economic concept of ‘‘opportunity cost’’ had been invoked by companies to justify
treating the free permits they had been allocated as costs that they might then pass on to customers.
He also noted that such opportunity costs were studiously avoided in financial accounts. One of the
authors of this memorial, Michael Bromwich, had a personal experience of the intensity of
Anthony’s concern about the possible misuse of the opportunity cost concept and his view that this
reasoning was not capable of being used in the way suggested. It fell to Bromwich to try, over

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several conversations and long emails, to explain the usual economic logic of this concept, which
Anthony never accepted. Anthony also took the opportunity of this introduction to carbon trading to
look again at corporate environmental reporting. Again, his ambivalence is palpable, as he
contrasted the potential for greater visibility created by the new forms of reporting with the
possibility for such reports serve ‘‘as a corporate veil, simultaneously providing a new face to the
outside world while protecting the inner workings of the organization form external view’’
(Hopwood 2009a, 437). He then picked apart the record of corporate recipients of the Association
of Chartered Certified Accountants’ (ACCA) 2008 top awards for Sustainability Reporting. He
argued that reporting will never be an adequate approach to corporate transparency in the
environmental sphere and pointed to the need for a multitude of ways of ‘‘enhancing the
informational context of corporate action.’’
Anthony took this opportunity to make the case for ‘‘The Connected Reporting Framework’’
now transmuted into the ‘‘International Integrated Reporting Council.’’ This blending and bringing
together of conventional financial reporting with social and environmental information offered a
practical form of ‘‘intertwining’’ whose aim, he suggested, goes beyond the static aims of reporting,
in an attempt to ‘‘reposition the significance of an environmental and sustainability agenda.’’ While
‘‘cautious’’ in his approach, he suggested that the reporting framework was explicitly imagined as
something that might itself promote rather than merely reflect organizational change. In a
conclusion, which acknowledges some of his own legacy, he argued:
The research traditions now established in the area of the organizational and social analysis
of accounting provide a good basis for looking beyond abstract schemes for change and
improvement to explore the actuality of their functioning and operations, and to use this
knowledge for the more realistic design of approaches to changing both the significance
which environmental and sustainability considerations play in the corporate sphere and our
ways of gaining insights into the adequacy or otherwise of these. (Hopwood 2009a, 439)
Explicitly, then, Anthony was now looking for ways in which his own research might lead to more
effective and skillful influence at the level of accounting practice.

Concern with the Research Process

Anthony had long held the belief that many lenses can be usefully utilized to consider
accounting, provided that this is done by people well grounded in the disciplines being employed.
He was also committed to sustaining the variety of research approaches used in Europe, as
explained in the next section. His own work was a manifestation of this approach. It is therefore
unsurprising that, toward the end of his career, he became increasingly uncomfortable with the
research process as it was being driven by the exclusive concern to publish in leading U.S. journals.
Expressing this view he said:
Increasingly, research at any one time has come to focus on a very limited set of issues and
approaches in the financial accounting area. Often method-led and seemingly subject to
waves of fashion, the dynamics behind the development of the accounting research agenda
appear to be internal to the academic community itself, rather than being influenced by the
shifting concerns of practitioners, regulators, or even the public at large. From time to time
the so-called mainstream agenda can be supplemented by brief periods of enthusiasm for
other perspectives, such as agency theory or other analytical approaches if, and I think it is
only if, they are introduced by influential researchers working at high-status
institutions.. . .. Certainly there are very few mechanisms by which the concerns of
practice can permeate the accounting academic world. (Hopwood 2008b, 88)

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He felt so strongly about the effects of this process on accounting research that he even alluded
to it in his response on being elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2008, when he said:
We live in times in accounting research when there are distinct signs of an intolerance of
difference and diversity. The mainstream is often dominant, invariably as a result of
narrow mindedness, a false sense of belief in very particular truths, and a fear of offending
the academic establishment rather than the fact that the dominant is always the right one.
(Hopwood 2008c, 3)
In contrast, he argued that, ‘‘if knowledge is to change, it must become what it wasn’t, at least
in part’’ (Hopwood 2008c, 4), and this requires the employment of diverse knowledges. He also
was very concerned with the increasing growth in Europe of the mechanistic ranking of journals in
promotion and employment decisions. As with other people concerned with these problems, he did
not have easy solutions. Encouraging an open attitude and building alliances and networks of
cooperation were some of his suggestions. His more radical suggestion was to build stronger links
with intelligent accounting practice and with others who use accounting. Such links may serve to
encourage a more diverse debate about accounting research but conflict with mainstream empirical
financial research that adjures any policy recommendations (Hopwood 2007, 2008b).

ACADEMIC ENTREPRENEUR
A number of institutional innovations generated by Anthony were part of his contribution to
making accounting research into ‘‘something it was not.’’ Here we look at a few of his innovations.

Accounting, Organizations and Society

The launch of this journal was brave. Anthony was a young, non-professorial academic, a
small number of top journals dominated the market focusing on financial accounting, researchers
working in the areas of interest of the journal were spread across the world and often isolated
without a strong network, and were researching in areas generally not welcomed by the U.S.
accounting research community. The idea for the journal came from working with Jake Birnberg on
the Behavioural Accounting Newsletter published in 1974 and 1975. None of the usual publishers
were interested. Robert Maxwell, the controversial owner of Pergamon Press, which had been
subject to major accounting scandals, was willing to back the journal (Napier 1992; Hopwood
2009). The condition was that Anthony writes Maxwell’s biography—a requirement he somehow
avoided.
The early days of the journal were not easy. Even when naming the journal he went against
general advice and favored Accounting, Organizations and Society over the more conventional
Journal of Behavioural and Social Accounting:
So I started thinking about alternative titles for a journal I saw as being focused on the
relationships between accounting and organizations and society. As I did so it suddenly
became clear to me that the most suitable name would be just that. (Hopwood 2009b, 890)
The early days of the journal were anxious, without its real research focus yet being fully
determined. For a couple of years, especially the third and fourth years, articles were scarce, which
was reflected in thin and late issues at a time when the journal had not yet established its credibility
within the research community (Hopwood 2009b).
Anthony always relied heavily on a relatively small group of trusted reviewers but was often
willing to be very patient with authors and back his own judgment, as he did in encouraging articles
in, then, new areas. For example, in the early years of the journal a number of new approaches were
represented by a significant number of articles. These included social and human resource

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Anthony G. Hopwood: Academic Iconoclast and Entrepreneur 1944–2010 905

accounting, social auditing, wealth distribution by firms, accounting and the control of labor
processes, corporate disclosure, information systems, and contingency theory. Over the years, many
other subjects that might not have been published in mainstream accounting journals appeared in
AOS early in their development. Some of these were the history of management accounting,
accounting and the state, calculative regimes, critiques of agency theory, and structuration theory.

The European Accounting Association

The European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM) was founded in 1971,
and Anthony was one of the very early members, joining in 1972. He immediately introduced the
very new, but strongly European approach, of considering the organizational and social roles of
accounting.2 He was a very important member of the EIASM, serving as a board member, president
of the board, and past president. He was instrumental in setting up the Institute’s program of
doctoral colloquiums and seminars. The importance of this body to European management research
is a study on its own, but Anthony’s roles here were evidence of his ability to adapt to, and work
politically in, a cross-culture environment and to innovate, which were strengths that he needed to
exploit fully in the founding of the European Accounting Association (EAA).
After a number of successful EIASM accounting workshops in the mid-seventies, a further
workshop in 1976 considered the founding of an EAA. It was co-chaired by Anthony and Edmund
Marquès and attracted 80 participants. (Carmona [2002] reviews the history of the EAA and is
relied upon here.) The first congress was held in Paris in 1978, after a dry run in 1977, but up to two
weeks before the congress there was a possibility of having to cancel. In the end there were
participants from 16 countries, but the U.K., Sweden, Denmark, The Netherlands, and Finland
accounted for 64 percent of the participants.
As with AOS, launching the EAA was a high-risk endeavor. Anthony describes the situation
positively as:
By 1976 the potential of a European community of accounting researchers was starting to
be recognized. An awareness of the rich diversity of Europe’s scholarly traditions was
emerging. . .. Scandinavian traditions of grounded organizational inquiry, Italian historical
studies, French analytical approaches, and British modes of theorizing and empiricism
were all becoming known to wider audiences. Of equal significance, European accounting
research gatherings had provided a unique way of appreciating the diversity of approaches
to both financial and management accounting, to modes of occupational institutionali-
zation in the accounting and audit areas, to the diverse forms of accounting regulation, and
to the different influence structures surrounding processes of accounting change.
(Hopwood 2002, 34)
While all of these differences gave rise to promising agendas, they also were barriers to be
overcome. National accountings were in silos—relatively few researchers from different countries
knew each other, as each national accounting was seen as at least no worse than those of others.
Each academic community had its own theoretical base, often defended strenuously by senior
professors with great power over academic careers. Some national antagonisms remained,
especially with regard to the seeming privileging of Anglo-Saxon financial accounting. Overcoming
these barriers, or at least living with them, required much careful ‘‘politicking’’ where Anthony
showed his ability to be a true diplomat. However, for some time the vestiges of these problems

2
We are grateful to Gerry Van Dyke for her comments on Anthony’s involvement with EIASM and EAA. She was
the senior administrator for the EAA at EIASM and later Secretary General of EIASM.

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December 2013
906 Birnberg, Bromwich, and Roberts

meant that it was difficult to persuade researchers from some countries, especially France, Italy, and
Germany, to attend in any numbers (Carmona 2002).

Other Initiatives
One of Anthony’s early U.K. initiatives was to convene a series of conferences, usually
organized with Michael Bromwich and sponsored by, then, Deloitte, Haskins & Sells. Pitman
published eight books of the papers from the conferences covering most areas of accounting
research. These conferences, starting in the late 1970s, represented a first attempt to get senior
accounting practitioners and researchers to discuss research together. The only problem was that, at
the first conferences, the practitioners refused to speak publicly in front of their competitors. This
was overcome by the threat of no lunch.
Here we have looked at some of Anthony’s major initiatives. There were many more. Indeed,
there were so many that Anthony forgot at least one. In the late 1970s the U.K.’s state-funded
Social Science Research Council, together with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England
and Wales (ICAEW), were concerned with the lack of a network for management accounting
researchers, who at the time were often isolated in their departments to comment on research in
progress. Anthony suggested a structure for such a network. This group still runs successfully
today.

CONCLUSIONS
What was truly remarkable about Anthony was the scale and breadth of his vision, both as a
researcher and as an institution builder. Given his view of accounting’s lack of ‘‘essence,’’ this was
a restless and repeatedly renewed vision so that, when one met Anthony, he too was always in the
process of becoming what he was not and thinking about new spaces where his imagination had not
formerly ventured. Perhaps too, we should observe the courage and confidence with which he
pursued this vision, which was, in many ways, against the grain of convention and certainly not a
path of least resistance. At an event held in his honor at LSE the year before his final illness, the
room was packed with ex-students and colleagues all of whom owed no small debt to Anthony for
the interest he had taken in, and the encouragement he had given to, their endeavors (see also,
Chapman et al. 2009). In his absence, it is perhaps for all of us to do our best to imitate his
generosity to more junior colleagues and repeatedly return to the scene of accounting practice to
disturb the complacency of our own and others’ knowledge of the accounting craft.

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