Norman Belding Macintosh - From contingency theory to literary theory

Much of the accounting literature up to the 1960s assumed that accounting captured an objective economic reality and that accounting information served primarily to assist rational decision makers’ search for profit. Macintosh observed this seemed to belie the obvious variations in accounting systems across organizations, and the ways that users accessed and processed accounting information. As the accounting discipline moved from a focus on the technique of accounting to consider accounting as an organizational and social process, researchers began looking for sources of this variation.