A contribuição das ciências exatas às ciências sociais aplicadas: estudo no curso de ciências contábeis

Abstract

The aim of this work is to present a review of the scientific literature on pieces of research that approach Accountancy and sciences such as Mathematics and Statistics. It is a bibliographical research based on articles, essays and treatises searched in several data bases. The methodology applied involved the research collection and analysis. In November 2010 a group of data basis was consulted (ISI, DOAJ, Scielo, Sumários.org, Redalyc, SSRN, Ebsco e Scholar Google) in order to find all pieces of work that approached the intersection of Accountancy with Mathematics and Statistics. Following this step, an analysis of all those academic papers was carried out so as to verify whether they discussed the intersection that was being searched or whether they only presented the key-words. The papers that did discuss the issue in question were read and analyzed and their results were transcribed and compared in a special item of the research. Several pieces of work mentioned the relationship between Mathematics and Accountancy, but only a few of them examined the potential and the results of such intersection. The analyses of such pieces of research presented some points: 1) Accountancy students have some difficulty with the contents of exact sciences; 2) the Accountancy information may become more useful when it receives a mathematical treatment ; 3) new resources are being used for the teaching of Mathematics to accountants, such as spreadsheets; 4) replacement of the nomenclature and syllabuses for exact sciences matters for Accountancy; and 5) there is no agreement among the pieces of research on whether the accountants believe or not in the usefulness of learning exact sciences.