Accounting Expertise as the Millennium Turns

This essay focuses on accounting expertise and what is happening to it as the millennium turns, drawing some speculative conclusions about developments we might expect in the near future. The positions taken are drawn from my research and teaching experiences. As this is an essay, citations are not made in the text but a bibliography is appended. Those sources gave me ideas, but they are not responsible for where I have taken the ideas!My focus is on what the accountant actually does in the world: the accountant's task and its surrounding environment, both of which define and shape expertise. Research and common sense make it clear that expertise is task-defined. Experts are good at some domain of knowledge and behaviour, and to provide that expertise they have structured memory and reasoning systems that are adapted to tasks they have experienced. Experience is key, whether by direct contact with the task or through stories, cases or instruction provided by other people. The necessary memory and reasoning knowledge structures are partly cognitive, in the expert's mind, but also may be external, such as in books, routines, decision aids, databases and authoritative standards. The sort of expertise that develops is conditioned by the tasks, by any support or other structures that come with them, and by incentives for good or poor task performance