After battling serious illness over the last few years, Professor
Anthony Hopwood died last weekend. He was one of the Honorary Doctors of the Turku School of Economics, having received his honorary degree at the first conferment ceremony of TSE in 1989.
Anthony Hopwood made an outstanding contribution to many areas of academic accounting and particularly notable was his contribution to the discipline of management accounting. His PhD at the University of Chicago was a groundbreaking application of methods and insights from social psychology to the subject of budgetary control and management accounting, and he went on to both develop these insights in the field of management accounting and also to use wider, organizational perspectives to the study of all aspects of accounting. He made his career at several major universities in the U.K., including the University of Oxford and London School of Economics and Political Science. He was the founding Editor of Accounting, Organizations and Society, now in its 35th year of publication, a journal which has had an incalculable impact on accounting research of all types. He was also a central figure in the founding of the European Accounting Association which is holding its 33rd annual congress next week in Istanbul.
Anthony's role in establishing and developing the European Accounting Association over the past 33 years just cannot be overstated. The world would not have been the same without his influence. He received a number of awards, including the Lifetime Contribution Award of the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association in 2008. Anthony's passing away is sadly mourned by his family (his wife Caryl and his sons, Justin and Mark) and by his many friends and colleagues throughout the academic and professional accounting world, including the research community of the Turku School of Economics.
For an appreciation and summary of Professor Anthony Hopwood's exceptional career, please follow the link
http://www2.lse.ac.uk:80/accounting/Home.aspx.
Professor Kari Lukka
Turku Shcool of Economics