Chapter 4: The Legitimate Concern with Fairness: A Comment

In drawing our attention to fairness as a legitimate concern for accounting academics as well as practitioners, Paul Williams makes two significant attacks on mainstream accounting research. Firstly, building on Ijiri’s (1983) editorial, he argues the importance of an accountability perspective relative to a decision usefulness perspective for external financial reporting, suggesting that a constraining principle (accountability) cannot be subsumed under a facilitating principle (decision usefulness). He further points out the inability of the decision usefulness framework to both evaluate and explain accounting data as well as its tendency to ignore the simultaneity of efficiency and distributive effects. Secondly, Williams questions the “value free” stance of mainstream accounting research, calling for a more explicit recognition of fairness. Since Ijiri raised the issue of fairness but seemed unprepared to consider the full range of possibilities that such a notion has as a goal for accounting, Williams elaborates on what might be at stake, drawing on theories of justice proposed by Nozick, Rescher and Rawls.