ABSTRACT
Driven by keen intellectual inquisitiveness, purpose, and conviction, Robert Raymond Sterling dedicated his professional life to developing scholarship in accounting education, practice, and research. Sterling’s principal intellectual legacy is his application of the theory of measurement to accounting. By analyzing what information was pertinent to financial actions, he identified the key elements of income and the attributes of these elements that were commonly required for informed financial decision making. At the heart of Sterling’s work was his quest for “a science of accounting,” a pursuit that extended naturally from his application of measurement theory to accounting. Sterling’s expertise as a theoretician is further exemplified in his meticulous dissection of the conventional accounting doctrines of conservatism, going concern, uniformity, and recognition. Sterling produced several papers in which the state of the accounting profession was the effective target of his analyses and criticisms of the state of conventional accounting.
