IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/lrc/lareco/v3y2015i4p68-72.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From instrumentalism to realism in accounting

Author

Listed:
  • Susila Munisamy

    (Associate Professor, Faculty of Economic, University of Malaya.)

  • Chia Zi Fon

    (Faculty of Economic, University of Malaya)

  • Edward Wong Sek Khin

    (Associate Professor, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya.)

Abstract

How, by their nature, the humans cannot have perfect knowledge, the only absolute thing is relativity, this being present in all their actions. In accounting, given its subject matter, it can talk of the relativity of the values that characterize the events in the life of an organization, this being caused by a wide variety of factors. In a previous article (Enachi, 2012) was identified a particular paradigm with visible effects in accounting practice, more precisely, it was talked about the transition from instrumentalism to realism in accounting. This paper supports the previous assertions and after explaining the accounting implications of the two fundamentally different approaches tries to provide solutions for bringing accounting closer to reality. A literature review is conducted to identify the limits that accounting presents in its attempt to capture the truth and the factors responsible for these limits. The main conclusion is that the quality of the professional judgments exercised in creating and implementing a system for accounting representation of reality, although partially controlled, is essential in increasing the reliability of the information provided by accounting.

Suggested Citation

  • Susila Munisamy & Chia Zi Fon & Edward Wong Sek Khin, 2015. "From instrumentalism to realism in accounting," Journal of Economic and Financial Studies (JEFS), LAR Center Press, vol. 3(4), pages 68-72, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:lrc:lareco:v:3:y:2015:i:4:p:68-72
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://journalofeconomics.org/index.php/site/article/view/117/205
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:lrc:lareco:v:3:y:2015:i:4:p:68-72. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: S Marjan (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.journalofeconomics.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.