Anthony Hopwood Receives 2008 Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award

The Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association is pleased to announce that it has awarded the Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award to Anthony Hopwood. The award recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to management accounting education, research, and practice over a sustained period of time through scholarly endeavors, teaching excellence, educational innovation, and service to the Management Accounting Section. The award extends profession-wide recognition to the recipient and promotes role models in management accounting.

Anthony Hopwood of the Said Business School at the University of Oxford (UK) is the 2008 recipient of the Section’s Lifetime Contribution to Management Accounting Award. Anthony has made a career of helping us become aware of all the interesting questions with which we, as management accountants, could and should concern ourselves. He has accomplished this without losing sight of the basic lesson he learned from his dissertation: Management accounting research always should have as its ultimate goal improving practice. Anthony not only has been a creative researcher in his own right, he also has been an outstanding facilitator of the work of others in a variety of ways.

At a time when management accounting research in North America was concerned with how the individual responded to the accounting system, Anthony in his dissertation began what would be a life-long interest in a different question: What he once described as theories of accounting, not theories in accounting. He asked: What role does accounting play in the organization and what organizational forces are responsible for that role? Through a series of papers he opened up our minds to what he once called "...an organizational perspective for the study of accounting." His most recent presentation of this view was in the Invited Presidential Address delivered at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Accounting Association, which recently has been published in The Accounting Review (2007).

Many of you undoubtedly are most familiar with Anthony through Accounting, Organizations and Society, the journal he has edited for over 30 years. Management accounting papers published in AOS reflect his perspective on management accounting research and provided management accountants with an outlet for their work long before JMAR existed. The diversity of the management accounting research published in AOS reflects his view of opening up accounting research to new ideas drawn from a wide variety of social sciences including economics, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Many nascent ideas that otherwise might not have seen the light of day have found an outlet in AOS. AOS served as bridge between management accounting research in European and North American long before e-mail and the internet. In short, Anthony not only was an early advocate of the organization oriented stream of research in management accounting, he participated in it and facilitated the efforts of others.

Acceptance Speech