This book is based on a series of papers and other material that the author (occasionally in co-authorship with others – see Acknowledgements) has written during the last decade or more. Several of these papers were from the very outset intended to be integrated in this book, but no chapter is identical to any previously published material. Other chapters are new and exclusive to this book. We hope that this is more than a collection of incidental articles but a systematic survey of the efforts that academics and theoretically oriented accounting practitioners made over a period of some 200 years
