William W. Cooper Receives First Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award

At this year's mid-year conference of the Management Accounting Section we made the Section's first Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting award. This award has been created to honor individuals who over their careers have made significant contributions to Management Accounting through research, teaching and service to the area. The first recipient is William W. Cooper, Foster Parker Professor (Emeritus) of Finance and Management and Professor (Emeritus) of Accounting, Management Science and Information Systems at the Graduate School of Business of the University of Texas-Austin. Professor Cooper, known to everyone as Bill, earned his A.B. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has honorary degrees from Ohio State, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon and the University Alicante (Spain). His previous honors and awards are numerous. They include being a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In accounting Bill is a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award from the American Accounting Association. Bill also was the first editor of Auditing: A Journal of Theory and Practice. Despite his emeritus status, Bill reported to the Dean of the McCombs Graduate School of Business at UT-A that he had five publications during the past year!

As these awards suggest, his influence covers a wide range of diverse areas. Within Management Accounting, Bill's contributions helped provide the impetus for those changes that made the section's name "Management Accounting" instead of "Cost Accounting." Many of you will be most aware of his contributions through the works of his students-Yuji Ijiri, Andy Stedry and Shyam Sunder at CMU and Rajiv Banker and Vijay Govindarajan at Harvard-and the numerous other accounting researchers for whom he has been a mentor.

Bill's own research has been characterized by a former colleague at Carnegie Mellon as being basic research intended to also improving practice. He is an "evolutionary." Bill himself argued that the role of management accounting is to assist management in making better decision and not providing data intended solely for valuation. This is the thrust of his 1951 paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics intended to extend the theory of the firm to control the intra-organizational issue of management control. To this end Bill has stressed the behavioral, quantitative and cost measurement in his own work and those of his students. In 1965 as chair of the Management Accounting Committee of the AAA he was able to secure a plenary session at the 1966 AAA National Meetings devoted to new methods for research and practice in management accounting. The papers presented covered both behavioral and quantitative approaches to management accounting. This session provided management accounting research with a highly visible forum at the very time the "new" cost accounting textbooks were reflecting a decision making orientation.

It is a pleasure to present the first Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award to William W. Cooper.

Above: William W. Cooper accepts the award. (Click to enlarge.)