ABSTRACT

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The staff experienced numerous problems in defining and classifying accounting items such as materiality, contract status and normal activity level. In the culture of accounting, ostensive learning is used at its most basic level to teach the student the six classifications: expense, asset, income, liability, capital and reserves. Thus, the culture of accounting is passed on in the form of paradigms which are upheld through academic, professional and in-house training. The staff typically experiment privately with various accounting methods or rule applications on spreadsheets and other software before proposing their preferred methods to others in formal and informal meetings. The interpretations by staff were also shaped by the extent to which they were part of the accounting culture. Analogous to how scientists extrapolate from conjecture, accountants made sense of accounting matters by drawing from the accounting culture.