Accounting, both as a profession and an academic discipline has been evolving since the American Accounting Association coined the generally accepted definition of accounting in 1966, ‘the process of identifying, measuring and communicating economic information to permit informed judgments and decisions by users of the information’.
Accounting can now be seen to operate, inter alia, as an ideological and political device, as an economic and as a social commodity. Understanding how accounting can best serve society in these contexts requires the development, testing and, when accepted, application of theories that serve to explain and predict behaviours and how humanity may best use accounting outputs to foster human welfare.