Double-entry bookkeeping work remembered in newest Ijiri memorial

A memorial article on the life and scholarship of Yuji Ijiri (1935–2017), commissioned by Accounting Horizons, has been completed by Professor Pierre Liang, a faculty member and lab director of the Accounting AI Research Lab, together with co-authors Martin E. Persson (Gies College of Business, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Shyam Sunder (Yale School of Management, Yale University). Titled "Yuji Ijiri (1935–2017): Measurement, Accountability, and Accounting as a Social Institution."

The memorial gives sustained attention to Ijiri's lifelong inquiry into the structure of double-entry bookkeeping, which he treated not as a settled convention but as one of accounting's foundational unresolved problems. Central to that inquiry is Ijiri's distinction between classificational and causal double-entry — the argument that the "double" in double-entry arises from accounting's design to track cause-and-effect relationships among events and transactions, rather than from the choice of two criteria for classifying resources. The memorial traces this structural perspective from Ijiri's 1965 work on incidence matrices through his 1975 Theory of Accounting Measurement and his later work on triple-entry bookkeeping and network matrices, situating it within his broader accountability framework and his concern with accounting as a social institution. Ijiri's structural perspective on bookkeeping continues to inform contemporary research at the Accounting AI Research Lab, including the lab's work on bookkeeping graphs and on accounting entropy and the information content of accounting classification.

Yuji Ijiri served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration (today the Tepper School of Business) from 1967 until his passing in 2017, holding the Robert M. Trueblood University Professorship — the university's highest academic distinction — from 1987. He served as President of the American Accounting Association in 1982–1983 and was inducted into the Accounting Hall of Fame in 1989.

About Accounting Horizons

Accounting Horizons is one of three association-wide journals published by the American Accounting Association(AAA). Established in 1987, the quarterly peer-reviewed journal aims to bridge accounting academics and non-academics — including practitioners, regulators, and students — by publishing rigorous academic research and thought-provoking perspectives pertinent to the accounting profession. The journal welcomes submissions of original academic research as well as commentaries, thought pieces, debates, historical reviews, editorials, and memorials. The American Accounting Association, founded in 1916, is the premier community of accountants in academia. More information about Accounting Horizons is available at https://aaahq.org/Research/Journals/Accounting-Horizons.