Irish accounting, business and financial history: a bibliographical essay

Historians have engaged with accounting and business archives primarily in the areas of social and economic history. While much economic and social history draws on macro-economic data, micro-level sources have cast new light on old historical problems such as the Great Famine (1845-51) and the development of trade in Ireland and between Ireland and abroad. This paper traces the contributions of historians of Ireland to our understanding of accounting, business and financial history and maps out potential areas of research for accounting and business historians in the light of earlier and current trends in historical research. Adopting a historians' perspective, the paper will also provide a historical background and suggest potential bibliographical and archival sources to present and future accounting and business historians with a view to enhancing and enriching our understanding of the context in which accounting and business is situated in Ireland.     

A French connection; paths to a ‘new system’ of accounting for the Royal Navy in 1832

This study contextualises the official introduction of double entry bookkeeping in the Royal Navy, in 1832. The objective is to consider how accounting developed and changed through the competing logics of path dependent processes and to provide insights and explanations of those accounting changes in the Royal Navy. An innovative theoretical framework combines the longer-term lens of historical institutionalism with the roles of key actors to investigate change, logic and meaning of accounting in the Royal Navy in the context of financial reforms resulting from governmental investigations. The study is intended to make a contribution to accounting history and theory by means of this extension of historical institutionalism, exploring the options available and the paths taken at critical junctures, as the result of key players and their influence on the practices developed. The study identifies the paths available to the Royal Navy in the adoption of this ‘new system’ of accounting. The paper contributes to the literature on accounting development and change, on military accounting history and on the political nature of accounting in exploring the influences for change.     

The Boulton & Watt Case: The Crux of Alternative Approaches to Accounting History?

In accounting history, authors who have adopted a ‘Foucauldian’ approach have recently debated with those representing the ‘Neoclassical’ school of thought the relative sophistication and significance of cost accounting developments in the UK and US respectively during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This paper argues that the differences between the two schools' understandings are important for comprehending the genesis and scope of modern cost and management accounting systems. It re-examines the historical case of Boulton & Watt, an engineering firm believed to have been in the vanguard of British Industrial Revolution accounting practice (Roll, 1930; Pollard, 1965 and 1990; Fleischman and Parker, 1991), in an attempt to clarify some of the key points of difference in the debate. It proposes that the historical crux for deciding where a modern managerial approach to accounting began lies in distinguishing between the development of engineering standards for materials and machine efficiency and the transfer of such performance measurements to human behaviour. A pressing task for historians is to establish when, where, how and why ‘labour standards’ were first articulated on the grounds that such forms of human accounting, by constructing norms of managerial performance, form the basis for modern management control. The paper reviews the primary sources on the history of cost accounting at Boulton & Watt, including the previously-acclaimed development of labour and engine standards. Its findings are that, while the latter were highly sophisticated as measures of engineering performance, they were less so on the economic dimension of cost measurement. Meanwhile, the evidence for labour standards is unconvincing; there was, around 1800, an intense period of investigating labour time and cost, but no subsequent long-term systematic control exercised over them analogous to the modern managerial approach found slightly later in US contexts. The paper suggests that one priority for further research is the detailed examination of early industrial enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic, in order to establish more definitively when, where, how and why this crucial development occurred.     

The relevance of history in accounting education: Some observations

This paper was commissioned by the Journal of Accounting Education in order to provide our readers with an assessment of the relevance of history in accounting education. Based on over 40 years of accounting experience, the author contends that accounting curricula should be broadened to include the teaching of accounting history. It is suggested that valuable insights can be gained from the study of how accounting has developed and changed in response to environmental changes (economic, political, social). Without such a historical perspective, accounting graduates will not have the necessary background to critically evaluate current accounting practices or be in a position to contribute significantly to our constantly changing profession.     

'Presenting' the past: perspectives on time for accounting and management history

Concepts of time in accounting and management historiography have only previously been considered as partial subsets of other methodological issues. This paper investigates our concepts of historical time with a view to offering alternative foundations to the unidirectional linear concept of chronological time employed in historical research project design and execution. Its analytical approach is pluralist in that it draws upon the historiographic writings of historians and historical theorists of traditional and post-modern persuasions, both within and beyond the accounting and management history fields. It addresses teleological, historicist and narrativist temporal underpinnings and considers historical practice in relation to assumptions about and interpretations of continuity and discontinuity. Time is extended beyond its conventional accounting and management chronology to include consideration of co-present, cyclical, relativist, structuralist and spatial time. Intrinsic and reflexive relationships between past, present and future are explored. The paper argues for a postmodern pluralisation of our historiographic approaches to time and their informing revisitations of historical accounting and management subjects with a view to better understanding that which we thought we already knew.     

Genealogies of calculation

This paper calls firstly for genealogies of calculation, in contrast to traditional accounting history. The term genealogy conveys a focus on the outcomes of the past, rather than a quest for the origins of the present. It is intended to avoid an a priori limiting of the field of study to accounting as it currently exists, or to a particular accounting technique such as double-entry bookkeeping. And it entails an emphasis on the historical contingency of contemporary practices, a concern with the multiple and dispersed surfaces of emergence of disparate practices of economic calculation. Secondly, the paper emphasizes the discursive nature of calculation, the language and vocabularies in which a particular practice is articulated, the ideals attached to certain calculative technologies. Thirdly, the paper stresses the importance of attending to ensembles of practices and rationales that are assembled at various collective levels, rather than with isolated instances of this or that way of accounting. The delineation of the domain of traditional accounting history is illustrated by reference to three sets of issues: the links between double-entry bookkeeping and capitalism in the writings of Weber and Sombart; the links between bookkeeping practice and decision making in the writings of Yamey; and the quest for examples of “early management accounting” in the writings of those such as Edwards and Fleischman & Parker. In contrast to such concerns of accounting history, four genealogies are presented: the promotion of discounted cash-flow techniques for investment decisions in the U.K. in the 1960s; the emergence of costs in the late eighteenth century; the accounting for value added event in Britain in the late 1970s; and the construction of standard costing in the early decades of the twentieth century.     

公允价值会计的国际应用

本文比较全面和系统地回顾了公允价值会计在国际上的运用及对公允价值问题的实证研究。在评价公允价值运用于会计准则的基础上,对公允价值会计的现状以及未来发展进行了讨论。总的来看,公允价值由于其高度的相关性,已受到各界的高度关注。公允价值会计极有可能成为21世纪资产和负债的计量基础。     

CLASS REPRODUCTION IN PROFESSIONAL RECRUITMENT: EXAMINING THE ACCOUNTING PROFESSION

This paper argues that the application forms of the ‘big-five’ accounting firms discriminate against applicants from working-class communities. While issues of discrimination in relation to race and gender have been considered in the accounting literature, discrimination and class in a contemporary setting is relatively under-explored. A historical analysis of the formation of the accounting profession in Scotland serves to illustrate the historical importance of class in controlling entry to the profession. During this period professions such as accounting came to play an increasingly important role in the reproduction of class from one generation to the next. However, in a contemporary setting processes of class reproduction are subtler. Initially access to university education was a key way of controlling access to professions. However, with the growth of a mass education system other strategies of reproduction have emerged. These are commonly based on an emphasis of charismatic qualities, also known as generic or transferable skills. This paper presents an analysis of the application forms of the big-five accounting firms and argues that the selection of future employees on the basis of these forms will favour applicants from the middle-class.     

Accounting history and theorising about organisations

Historical accounting research has a substantial track record of using a variety of theoretical insights to better understand how and why accounting has contributed to, and been affected by, organisational change and development. The article outlines the emergence of a range of theories that have been employed by accounting historians, against the background of the development of accounting history as a significant disciplinary field within accounting research. From its investigation of accounting historians’ approaches to studying accounting as a central practice in organisational processes, it reveals how historical accounting studies have been informed by and contributed to theorisation of such organisational phenomena. The article concludes that theory is largely used to provide conceptual frameworks for historical narratives, with historical accounting research often focused on case studies of single organisations or organisational settings. However, theory has also been mobilised at more general levels, to provide meta-narratives of the rise of capitalism and the emergence of managerialism. Far from treating accounting as technical practice, accounting historians are revealed as conceiving accounting as social practice, impacting both human behaviour and organisational and social functioning and development. As social practice, accounting emerges deeply embedded and pervasive in organisations and societies.     

THE ORIGINS OF PRUDENCE IN ACCOUNTING

The paper attempts to explain the historical reasons for the dominance of the prudence concept in financial accounting by tracing the history of its meaning up to the end of the nineteenth century. Prudent accounting represented the elaboration by the accounting profession of a distinctive competence@8ithe determination of distributable profit@8iwhich enabled it to appear as the ally and advisor of large investors and management against “speculators”, thereby ensuring an equal return for equal capital. Prudence was crucial to the accounting profession in regulating the social relations of capital     

Understanding the changes in accounting thought

Financial accounting and reporting are in the midst of one of the most significant revolutionary changes in modern history. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework that will contribute to the dialogue surrounding these developments. We use Kuhn’s [Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press] framework on the theory of scientific revolution to describe how changes in the need for information, coupled with the lack of relevant accounting information, led to reporting anomalies that have spurred a revolutionary shift in accounting paradigms. We are moving from an accounting paradigm that existed in the age of an industrial economy to an accounting paradigm that fits the economy in an information age. This redirection has resulted in the following: a change in the conceptualization and application of relevance and reliability, an increased use of fair value versus historical cost measurements, a renewed emphasis on principles versus rules, and an evaluation of the composition of the basic financial statements.     

A guide to the historical controversies and organizational contexts of standard costs

Undergraduate accounting students in the US receive little or no exposure to the history of their discipline. In an effort to remedy this deprivation, the authors suggest a series of historical vignettes to serve as collateral reading in accounting courses. This essay, designed to supplement the standard costing and variance analysis chapters of a cost or managerial textbook, is offered as an example of the historical background pieces envisioned.Students and educators alike may not realize that standard costing has served far different roles in the premodern, modern, and postmodern eras. We trace the history of cost accounting from the UK and US industrial revolutions to the current era in order to identify several divergent interpretations attributed to standard costing. We emphasize how the purposes of standard costing have changed over time and why target costing is the proper focal point in the postmodern era.     

A Marxist accounting history of the British industrial revolution: a review of evidence and suggestions for research

An important debate neglected by accounting historians concerns the existence, origins and significance of the British Industrial Revolution (BIR). A key problem is explaining why Britain was such a technologically creative society. Part one uses accounting ideas to explain Marx's theory that industrial capitalism first appeared in Britain and was revolutionary because it took control of production to maximise the rate-of-return on capital employed. Part two shows that accumulating evidence of the use of modern management accounting by leading firms during the BIR supports Marx's view that it was a capitalist revolution in his sense. Part three argues that the accounting history of Boulton and Watt supports the hypothesis that the capitalist mentality and accounts drove revolutions in the technical and social relations of production during the BIR. Part four re-examines other well-known key sites for the study of accounting history and argues that these cases support the hypothesis that the primary cause of variations in accounting during the BIR was variations in the social relations of production. The paper makes suggestions for further research and concludes that, by thoroughly testing Marx's theory, accounting historians can make an important contribution to a major historical debate.     

Commentary: Business Black Swans and the Use and Abuse of a Notion

Historical enquiry reveals how ideas mutate. This paper traces how ideas and practices underpinning initial understandings of fair value accounting (FVA) have changed as the concept drifted from the utility rate‐setting context to that of corporate financial reporting. The recall of history for the purpose of ‘learning lessons from the past’ has frequently resulted in misunderstandings of the historical record and misapplication of so‐called lessons. A more fruitful approach to recalling history is to gain insights into the development of the ideas (good and bad) that have contributed to current predicaments. Initially fair value was the basis for specific pricing calculations related to companies with a highly restricted scope of operations. Later, more by accident than design, the concept became a general purpose application used in the financial statements of highly and freely adaptive companies. The mark‐to‐market (MtM) dispute emerging in the global financial crisis (GFC) has given rise to a further mutation of the use of FVA. Discarding MtM contradicts what history tells us was the purpose of adopting fair value into accounting for adaptive companies. This analysis also highlights how conducive accounting theory and practice are subject to politicisation. Accounting is an apparently unresisting victim of interested parties’ special pleading, resulting in the corruption of its technical function – in this case primarily because it is inconvenient to have accounting data tell it how it is.     

Accounts of change: 30 years of historical accounting research

Over the past three decades, a desire to understand the processes of change within accounting, and the contribution made by accounting to broader societal and organizational change, has stimulated a substantial body of historical research in accounting. Labelled as the “new accounting history”, this diverse collection of methodological approaches addressing a wide range of problems has made possible the posing of new questions about accounting’s past. The understanding of what counts as accounting has broadened, a greater awareness of how accounting is intertwined in the social has emerged, voices from below have been allowed to speak, while accounting has been seen to be implicated in wider arenas, with networks of practices, principles and people constituting varieties of “accounting constellations”. The paper reviews the central contribution of Accounting, Organizations and Society to the emergence of the new accounting history, and suggests some directions in which this may develop in the future.     

Accounting and the birth of the notion of capitalism

The purpose of this paper is to cast a new light on the post-Sombartian debate. As we know, Sombart (Sombart W. Der moderne Kapitalismus. München, Leipzig: Duncker and Humbolt, 1916) thought that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping was essential to the birth of capitalism. Max Weber developed the same theme, but to a lesser extent. Accounting scholars have debated the idea quite extensively during the 20th century. All these previous works have in common the fact that they address the historical question by comparing accounting practices to business practices, some of which are interpreted as capitalist. In this paper, my aim is not so much to understand the birth of capitalism, but to contribute to some understanding of the birth of the concept of capitalism itself. The concept was forged during the 19th century. At that time, capitalism and a certain kind of double-entry bookkeeping practice that was able to highlight the circuit of capital were inextricably linked. It might be suggested that this historical situation greatly helped the scholars of the period to conceptualise what they called capitalism, and it is easy to show that the notion of capitalism itself is rooted in accounting notions. I will thus argue that the history of how the concept of capitalism was invented is an example of the influence of accounting ideas on economic and sociological thinking.     

The plight of accounting education in Australia: a review article ∗

This paper summarizes the history and effects of the Australian Government's higher education lsquo;reformrsquo; agenda on the accounting discipline. After providing a brief historical perspective, the paper summarizes the contents of the Task Force for Accounting Education in Australia, a Report commissioned by the two major Australian professional accounting bodies. An overview of the Government's higher education Green and White Papers and their implications for the accounting discipline in higher education, is then provided. We then survey some of the key recommendations of the Report of the Review of the Accounting Discipline in Higher Education(The Mathews Report), an enquiry commissioned by the Australian Government after an intensive lobbying campaign by the accounting profession. The paper concludes with summary contents.     

TELLING STORIES ABOUT ACCOUNTING HISTORY

The state of relations between traditional and critical (or “new”) accounting historians has itself become an issue as the renewal of interest in accounting history continues. This note highlights the dialogic move within the accounting history community and develops a number of stories in support of it. In particular it explores whether the historical narrative, itself the subject of renewed interest in the human sciences, can foster community relations.     

Financial control, managerial control and accountability: evidence from the British Cotton Industry, 1700–2000

The paper seeks to identify the underlying and long run historical determinants of accounting practices. These practices include the nature and relative importance of management and financial accounting techniques, together with the mediating roles of corporate finance and especially financial markets. To explain historical variation in the application of these techniques the paper introduces an analytical model. The model is based on the principles of historical materialism and hence comprises objective and subjective elements. Definitional categories are borrowed from Marx’s analysis of the workings of capitalism, and extended to include contexts where there is extensive socialization of capital, as manifested by the pooling of investments in liquid financial markets. To examine the detailed implications for accounting change, the model is then applied to a longitudinal case study of the British cotton textile industry. The paper shows that techniques of financial and managerial control and mechanisms of accountability can be explained by the dynamic interaction of capital centralization and capital socialization.