Professor’s accounting book honored

Professor’s
accounting book honored
…………………………………………………………………

BY MAILEEN HAMTO
Special to the Rice News

For his work
on a biography commended by accounting history scholars
throughout the world, Stephen Zeff, the Herbert S. Autrey
Professor of Accounting, received his second Hourglass Award
from the Academy of Accounting Historians.

Zeff was honored
with the award for his critically acclaimed biography “Henry
Rand Hatfield: Humanist, Scholar and Accounting Educator”
(2000, JAI Press).

He was the first
recipient of the Hourglass Award at its inception in 1973.

The Academy of
Accounting Historians seeks to encourage research, publication,
teaching and personal interchanges in all phases of accounting
history and its interrelation with business and economic
history. Presented annually at the academy’s November
research conference, the Hourglass Award recognizes an individual
who has made a demonstrable and significant contribution
to knowledge through research and publication in accounting
history.

“The quality
of the biography and the scholarship Zeff presents in this
book are impeccable,” said O. Finley Graves, professor
of accounting at Kansas State University and a 1970 Rice
alumnus who also is president of the Academy of Accounting
Historians. “Through this book, he shows how values
and other historical forces have influenced accounting thought.
He has also brought Henry Rand Hatfield to life.”

Through meticulous
research that spanned more than 30 years, Zeff published
the acclaimed biography revealing the life and scholarship
of Henry Rand Hatfield (1866-1945), long regarded as the
“dean of accounting teachers everywhere.”

Zeff began his
research on Hatfield’s life in the 1960s, when at the
encouragement of Maurice Moonitz, a former student of Hatfield’s
and professor of accounting at the University of California,
Berkeley, he began poring over Hatfield’s extensive
files of correspondence, notes and papers stored at the
university. Zeff then proceeded to interview or correspond
with many of Hatfield’s former colleagues and students.

“The book
is characteristic of the body of work Zeff has delivered
throughout his entire career,” Graves said. “His
work reflects how accounting is more than just adding, subtracting,
multiplying and dividing — that it is socially motivated
and imbued with values.”

The volume also
has received rave reviews from accounting scholars.

Zeff, who has
taught at Rice since 1978, was editor of the Accounting
Review from 1977 to ’82 and was president of the American
Accounting Association (AAA) in 1985-86. In 1988, he received
the AAA’s Outstanding Accounting Educator Award, and
in 1999 the AAA’s International Accounting Section
named him the recipient of its International Accounting
Educator Award.

Zeff holds bachelor’s
and master’s degrees from the University of Colorado
and an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

— Maileen
Hamto is assistant director of public relations at the Jesse
H. Jones Graduate School of Management.