The Impact of Faculty Accounting Outside Academe
Current assessments of research in UK universities are widening the criteria from publication directed at other academics to include also the impact of the research on the world outside academe.[1] The accounting-related activi?ties of the Faculty offer a lengthy scorecard in this respect. Thus, Stone was a central figure in the construction of the UK’s, and then the world’s, national accounts. Whittington was a central figure in the overhaul and reconstruction of first the UK’s, and then the world’s, business accounts. Barker, with Peterson, led the way in engaging big business—companies such as IBM and ICI—in modelling and forecasting disaggregated national accounts; and Barker played a lead role at the IPCC. Dasgupta has been a leader in developing Green National Accounts for India.
Then there was an important indirect channel of influence on practice. At times in the twentieth century the accounting profession was (by some margin) the leading recruiter of graduates from the Economics Tripos. For example, in the four years (1979-1982), 150—more than a quarter—of those whose destination was known by the University Careers Service joined the accounting profession, almost twice as many as went into banking, broking, and so on, the next most popular destination.19,20 Despite not having an accounting Tripos or an accounting department,[2] Cambridge was evidently well thought of for accounting: the 2012[3] QS World University Rankings placed Cambridge accounting tenth in the world on the basis of citations and evaluations by employers and academic peers. The recognition also took a form which both economists and accountants find particularly persuasive: Stone’s chair was funded by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) and Whittington’s by Price Waterhouse![4]
- 20 More recently the primary destination has become the banking industry: in the decade up to the 20072008 financial crisis value added in the financial sector of the UK economy grew at around 6% per annum, twice the rate of GDP (Burgess 2011), and this meant that the sector absorbed many Cambridge graduates. Even after the crisis, 143 of those graduating from the Economics Faculty went into banking in the four years after 2008. Only 29 joined accounting firms (University Careers Service data).
- 21 Except in the MPhil in Finance in the 1990s the Faculty did not have an exam paper devoted just to accounting. Peterson gave a course on national income accounting within the Part 1 Statistics paper from the 1980s, and Whittington, then Meeks, gave one on traditional business accounting in the 1990s. Nevertheless, national income accounts were for decades an important part of the regular diet in applied economics for Tripos students: the Blue Book was a required purchase when I joined the Tripos in 1969.
- [1] The bibliography to this chapter (far from comprehensive) gives a clue as to the extent of accounting-related publications by Faculty members. Much of this is in sister disciplines of accounting. Within themore conventional boundaries of academic accounting observed in most universities, an indicator ofpublication rates by Faculty members (and faculty elsewhere in the University who had been trained inthe Economics Faculty) is given by Chan et al. (2006): they report that Cambridge accounting was fourthin Europe in its per capita rate of publications in the main accounting journals.
- [2] 19 I am extremely grateful to officers in the University Careers Service, in particular Mary Blackman,Gordon Chesterman, and Alan Fawcett, for access to their excellent long-term records of destinations ofgraduates.
- [3] 22 Although this post-dates the Faculty’s withdrawal from accounting, this reputation was built up bymembers of the Economics Faculty or Cambridge academics in other departments who had been trainedin the Faculty.
- [4] 23 Declaration of interest: I have benefited from an ICAEW Fellowship, research funding and their platform to engage with the profession, for example, the 2008 P.D. Leake Lecture.
