1996 Vangermeersch Award Winner: THE TELLING POWER OF CCA . A NEW ZEALAND ORAL HISTORY

This report presents results of research on the failure of the inflation accounting standard in New Zealand. Presentation of the results in three narratives highlights that any such research is a series of interlocking and overlapping events, and that narrative is a direct and efficient means of communicating both causal and transactional components which contributed towards the outcomes. Isolation of the three narratives was chosen to demonstrate that it is not useful to extol an explanatory or interpretative paradigm for accounting history if it is advocated at the expense of sequential accounts of events.