Accounts of Change-30 Years of Historical Accounting Research

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Accounts of change: 30 yearsof historical accounting research

Christopher J. Napier *

School of Management, University of Southampton, Higheld, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK

Abstract

Over the past three decades, a desire to understand the processes of change within accounting, and the contributionmade by accounting to broader societal and organizational change, has stimulated a substantial body of historicalresearch in accounting. Labelled as the new accounting history, this diverse collection of methodological approachesaddressing a wide range of problems has made possible the posing of new questions about accountings past. The under-standing of what counts as accounting has broadened, a greater awareness of how accounting is intertwined in thesocial has emerged, voices from below have been allowed to speak, while accounting has been seen to be implicatedin 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 newaccounting history, and suggests some directions in which this may develop in the future.

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Introduction

Accounting has changed, is changing, and islikely to change in the future. This statement mightalmost be regarded as a truism. Claims about

change permeate both popular and academic man-agement and accounting literature. Professionalaccountants and their organizations present them-selves as leaders of change. Accounting methods,

techniques, ideas and practices, those accountingand those accounted for, the roles of accountingwithin and between individuals and organizations,the place and signicance of accounting in soci-etyall of these differ in 2005 from 1975 or earlier.

Yet how well do we understand how accountingchanges? Can we show and explain, as Hopwood(1990, p. 16) puts it, how accounting becamewhat it was not?

The journal Accounting , Organizations and Society was founded by Hopwood at a timewhen many accounting scholars and practitionerswere beginning to recognize that accounting was

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going through a period of transition. As Hopwoodwas to state in the inaugural issue of the journal:

Unfortunately, however, although recog-nized as important, all too often accountinghas been seen as a rather static and purelytechnical phenomenon. Nothing could befurther from the truth. The purposes, pro-cesses and techniques of accounting, itshuman, organizational and social roles, andthe way in which the resulting informationis used have never been static. The economicdistinctions drawn by accountants and themethods which they use are themselves cre-ations of the human intellect and reect

social as well as economic evaluations. Theyhave evolved, and continue to evolve, in rela-tion to changes in the economic, social, tech-nological and political environments of organizations ( Hopwood, 1976, p. 1 ).

Yet how could change in accounting be under-stood? One approach that was perhaps alreadyimplicit in Hopwoods rst editorial was to becomemore explicit a few issues later. This approach wasaccounting history. Hopwoods call for historicalstudies was couched in terms that would later be

labelled as traditional, but nonetheless it repre-sented an awareness that historical studies couldbe an important source of understanding of theroles of accounting in organizations and society:

Accounting as currently practised, and itshistorical development, highlight the evolu-tionary and contingent nature of the subjectin a way that is invariably absent from themanuals of received knowledge. Rather thanbeing static and purely technocratic,accounting has had, and hopefully still has,the potential of being a responsive and adap-tive calculative technology that can relate toand facilitate broader processes of enterpriseand social development.

Such an evolutionary perspective raises manyissues that are particularly salient at the pres-ent time. It encourages us to consider theinstitutional processes that can both facilitateand constrain the development of account-ing. It might even point to the desirability

of considering the impact that the profession-alization of the accounting craft, and latergovernmental or regulatory standardization,

had on the adaptability of the technology.The relationship of accounting to organiza-tional power structures, and the attendantpressures to maintain the organizational sta-tus quo in terms of the preservation of exist-ing organizational relationships, languagesof discourse and ways of dening the scopeof the problematic, also need further inquiryin this respect (Hopwood, 1977, p. 277 ).

In this paper, I review the ways in which a liter-ature of accounting history developed in AOS . In

Accounting history and AOS section, I briey ana-lyze the extent to which historical papers haveappeared in the journal in different periods, andcomment on some common themes. In Account-ing, change and history section, I look more clo-sely at the value of historical research inaccounting, and discuss how some technical andscholarly approaches to understanding account-ing, by adopting a present-timeless ( Hacking,1995, p. 299) view of accounting, run the risk of removing accounting from its temporal context.The new accounting history section chroniclesthe emergence of the new accounting history,and Themes in the new accounting history sectionexamines more closely three of the principalthemes of historical research published in AOS :accounting, power and knowledge; accountingsprofessionalization project; and new understand-ings of accountings roles in representing the eco-nomic. Finally, Appraisals and prospects sectionassesses the contribution of historical accountingresearch as published in AOS , and sets out somepossible future directions.

Accounting history and AOS

As Table 1 shows, historical research was slowto emerge in AOS . In the rst 10 years of the jour-nal, only 13 historical papers were published.However, among these papers were early examplesof two theoretical perspectives that would becomedominant in the journal in later years: the political

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economy of accounting view associated with Tin-ker (1980) and Tinker, Merino, and Neimark(1982), and the Foucault-inuenced analysis of accounting in terms of power and knowledgeintroduced by Burchell, Clubb, and Hopwood(1985) in their analysis of the value added epi-sode in British nancial reporting. The earlyyears of the journal saw an eclectic range of histor-ical papers, including two contributions rmlywithin the neo-classical economics frameworkbased around transaction costs ( Chandler &Daems, 1979; Johnson, 1983 ) that was later to bea target of sustained critique.

Historical research came into its own during

the next ve-year period. This saw the develop-ment of the Foucault-inuenced perspective byHoskin and Macve (1986, 1988), Miller andOLeary (1987, 1990), Hopwood (1987), and Loft(1986), early work on the accountings profession-alization project by Willmott (1986) , and an earlycontribution using labour process theory by Arm-strong (1987). These perspectives and others wereto blossom in subsequent periods, helped byimportant special issues of the journal devotedentirely (Vol. 16, No. 5/6, 1991) or substantially

(Vol. 18, No. 7/8, 1993) to historical papers, nowoperating within an identied genre of the NewAccounting History. More recently, historicalaccounting research has come to represent about20% of the journals content. Diverse themes andtheories have been adopted, but most papers havebeen intended by their authors to advance ourunderstanding of the diverse and changing rolesof accounting in society, and the changing natureof the accountant as a professional or simply asa worker.

The 143 papers classied by the present authoras historical1 cover a wide range of theoretical

Table 1Historical papers in AOS , 19762005

Years Volumes Total papers Historical papers Historical percentages

Number Pages Number Pages Papers (%) Pages (%)19761980 15 141 1662 4 46 2.8 2.819811985 610 144 1995 9 144 6.3 7.219861990 1115 182 2917 22 492 12.1 16.919911995 1620 187 3713 46 1203 24.6 32.419962000 2125 190 3854 34 651 17.9 22.120012005 2630 161 3861 28 808 17.4 20.9

Totals 1005 18 002 143 3544 14.2 19.7

1 What constitutes a historical paper is not, at the margin,clear-cut. I scrutinized every paper appearing in AOS (theanalysis in Table 1 excludes general editorials, obituaries,notices, errata and similar items but includes all substantivepapers, including reviews and comments, and substantiveintroductions to special issues or sections). Many papers werespecically identied by their authors as historical in nature.Papers that dealt with periods substantially earlier than the timeof writing (usually 30 years or more) were generally classied ashistorical, but where the paper simply used old data but did notpresent a specically historical analysis, it was not included. Anexample of such a paper is Brocheler, Maijoor, and vanWitteloostuijn (2004) , which analyzes the Dutch audit marketfrom the 1920s, but does not go beyond including some dummyvariables representing different time periods in the analysis of the data. On the other hand, papers addressing relatively recentevents were classied as historical if they adopted a substan-tially narrative framework and/or have been regarded in thesubsequent literature as historical. A good example of this is theseminal Burchell et al. (1985) paper, identied by its authors asa history of value added in the United Kingdom even thoughit dealt with events that had occurred over a period of only afew years before the writing of the paper. Another examplewould be the study of events in the auditing profession inGreece in the 1990s undertaken by Caramanis (2002) , another

paper self-described by the author as historical. The mostdifficult decision involved the paper by Miller and OLeary(1994) on Caterpillars Plant with a Future, and relatedcritiques by Arnold (1997) and Froud, Williams, Haslam,Johal, and Williams (1997) . Even though Arnold specicallytitled her comment The limits of postmodernism in accountinghistory, the critique, like the original Miller and OLeary(1994) paper, did not on close reading appear to take a formthat could be classied as accounting history. Any classi-cation of this nature must reect a degree of subjectivity, and Iam sure that some of the papers that I have classied ashistorical in the appendix would not have been regarded assuch by their authors.

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perspectives. Most papers explicitly avow a theo-retical foundation, though in much of the profes-sionalization literature, where a well-developed

critical sociology of the professions has emergedparticularly in the context of studies of theaccounting profession, this is often developed indi-rectly by reference to prior studies rather thanbeing discussed at length. Notwithstanding this,a few papers do not develop or avow a theorydirectly, and in the appendix have on occasionimputed a theory to the author(s) based on closereading of the papers concerned.

Although the papers reect a degree of geo-graphical spread, the principal countries involvedare the USA, UK and the predominantly Eng-lish-speaking countries of the former BritishEmpire (dominated by Australia and Canada).Most papers address periods in the 19th and20th centuries. Out of the 30 years of papers inAOS reviewed in the present paper, 10 years(19901999) were analyzed by Carmona (2004) aspart of a broader study. Carmona (2004, p. 12)concluded: Non-Anglo-Saxon scholars, non-Anglo-Saxon settings, and periods of study otherthan 18501945 are largely neglected in the inter-national arena. Although this is certainly true

of AOS not only in the period that Carmonareviewed but also in earlier times, the last ve yearsof historical accounting research in AOS haveexhibited a greater degree of spatial dispersionthan previous periods, with papers addressingBangladesh ( Uddin & Hopper, 2001 ), Belgium(De Beelde, 2002), France ( Ramirez, 2001 ), Greece(Caramanis, 2002 ), Italy (Quattrone, 2004 ), Nige-ria (Uche, 2002), South Africa ( Chua & Poullaos,2002), Spain (Carmona, Ezzamel, & Gutierrez,2002), Sweden (Larsson, 2005 ) and Trinidad and

Tobago ( Annisette, 2000, 2003), as well as themore traditional Anglo-Saxon countries. Moststudies, however, remain based on single countries,and there has been little use of a comparative inter-national approach as advocated by Carnegie andNapier (2002) .

As the appendix shows, only comparatively fewpapers use primary personal or organizationalarchives as their main sources of evidence. Somepapers, particularly those examining accountingsprofessionalization project, make use of official

documents, such as laws and legal cases, andreports by governmental and other authoritativebodies, as well as the published nancial state-

ments of companies and other organizations.Given the interest in discourses of accountingexpressed in the historical literature, it is not sur-prising that important sources of evidence are con-temporary writings (text-books, professional journals, newspapers and magazines) aboutaccounting. As discussed below, in Appraisalsand prospects section, the new accounting his-tory has been criticized for its apparent disdainfor archival evidence. Yet, of the 143 papers ana-lyzed in the appendix , only about one-third (45)are entirely literature-based, in that they useno primary archival or oral evidence, nor makesubstantial use of documentation contemporarywith the periods under review.

Over the past 30 years, as Table 1 shows, his-torical papers have occupied nearly 20% of thepages of AOS . Several of these papers have hada highly signicant inuence on the scholarlyaccounting literature. Based on an extensive cita-tion analysis, Brown (1996) prepared a list of thetop 100 research papers in accounting. He clas-sied three of the papers listed in the appendix as

classics (Hopwood, 1987; Loft, 1986; Miller &OLeary, 1987) and four as near classics (Arm-strong, 1987; Burchell et al., 1985; Hoskin &Macve, 1986; Tinker et al., 1982 ), while anotherwas included in the rest of the top 100 (Leh-man & Tinker, 1987 ). Of the 20 papers in the journal included in Browns top 100, eightare historical, and there were no historical papersfrom other journals in Browns list. Within theliterature of accounting history, the contributionof the journal has also been recognized as highly

inuential. In his four-volume collection of 68key works, Edwards (2000) selects no fewerthan 12 papers from AOS , while Fleischman(2005), in a three-volume collection intended tooverlap as little as possible with the Edwards vol-umes, selects ve AOS papers in his set of 46.Why should there be such an interest in historicalresearch in this particular journal? In the nextsection, I consider how important historical per-spectives become when accounting is perceivedas being pervaded by change. This will then be



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followed by an examination of some of the mostimportant areas in which historical accountingresearch, not only in AOS but in other places,

has provided deep insights into our understand-ing of accounting as it has functioned in the pastand continues to function in organizations andsociety.

Accounting, change and history

Is change important to accounting?

To the American historian Lawrence Stone, theproblem of history is fundamentally explana-tion of change over time ( Stone, 1991, p. 217).Desires to document accounting changes andexplain such changes by identifying their causeshave been important motivations for historicalaccounting research over many decades. Indeed,even introducing a notion of change in the rstplace suggests issues of a historical nature.Change implies difference: what we observeand experience today is not the same as what wemight have observed and experienced in the past.Given this view of change as an object of study,

researchers face the evidential issue of describingaccounting in the past, or at least documentingan absence of accounting in particular contexts.They must deal with the epistemological issue of how far our descriptions of the past actually countas knowledge (Napier, 2002 ). Even at the level of personal memory, how far are our recollectionscoloured by nostalgia for some lost time, how farare they reconstructed in the light of subsequentexperience, how far does a pervasive discourse of change encourage us to structure our recollections

according to an image of progress or decay(Napier, 2001 )? Does change have some underly-ing mechanism (are there laws of change, forexample), do changes, despite their apparent spec-icity, demonstrate common structures and char-acteristics, or is each change fundamentallyunique? Can we meaningfully explain a givenchange by reference to causative factors, or isexplanation in history limited to elucidation of events through rich description? Or is it more help-ful to regard change as a phenomenon of the pres-

ent moment, or disregard it altogether as ananalytical category?

Certainly much accounting research, education

and practice treats accounting as a phenomenonof the present, and considers accounting change,if at all, as very much a second-order effect.Text-book authors frequently discuss differentaspects of the broad accounting discipline (suchas nancial reporting, costing, nancial manage-ment, auditing) in terms of the recognized rulesand practices of the day, with little or no sugges-tion that these might have been different at someearlier time (and therefore by implication mightbe different again in the future). As an example,consider a leading US introductory textbookIntroduction to Financial Accounting (Horngren,Sundem, & Elliott, 1999 ). Although it wouldnot be accurate to present this book as com-pletely ahistorical, references to past events, andtherefore by implication to difference and change,are isolated and essentially anecdotal. EquivalentBritish textbooks also tend to set out accountingpractice in a timeless manner. Even thoughchange may be acknowledged, it often appearsin terms of future developments rather than pastevents. 2

It is perhaps unfair to criticize experienced text-book authors too much for providing what theybelieve students and their instructors want. How-ever, by presenting accounting in a technical andahistorical manner, they promote a specic imageof accounting as a collection of well tried andtested (Weetman, 1999, p. 748 ) techniques. Writ-ers may rationalize these techniques by referenceto some theory or another, but in practice they

2 For example, in her introductory textbook, Weetman (1999)spends some 400 pages presenting nancial accounting in astatic manner before admitting Accounting is a subject whichdevelops faster than most textbooks can be written (p. 403),then a further 300 pages outlining management accountingbefore conceding that the methods described have a historydating back to the early years of the 19th century (p. 748).Earlier editions of the leading British management accountingtextbook by Drury (2000) included a chapter past, present andfuture developments in management accounting, but this wasdeleted in the fth edition.



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appear in the text-books often simply because theyare used. 3 Sometimes, text-book authors may pro-vide a brief survey of how a particular accounting

issue, regulation or technique has developed, butimplicit in this is often a claim that the presentpractice, described in detail in the text, is the cul-mination of a process of progress and improve-ment. There is no need to say much aboutprevious accountings, as they are, on this argu-ment, inferior and thus deserve to be superseded.Again, this may be a reasonable pedagogic strat-egy for text-book authors to adopt, as studentsmay become confused when presented with differ-ent methods rather than the single right answer.Inevitably, though, this presents accounting as atechnology where right answers are the norm.

This pedagogic approach to accounting helps tosustain and recreate accountants who paradoxi-cally are exhorted to embrace change while learn-ing a craft that appears to be present-timeless(Hacking, 1995, p. 299). In this, accountants maynot be too different from those in other vocationaldisciplines, such as medicine, engineering and law.However, medicine has a clear mission of making people better and engineering of making things bet-ter, and these missions are reected in applied

research as well as practice. Even legal researchhas a strong element of making better laws. Muchrecent accounting research, however, has lost touchwith notions of technical improvement in account-ing practice. There has been a focus in somequarters on analytical, experimental or a rchival-empirical approaches ( Anonymous, 1988 )4 and a

view of the role of scientic research in account-ing as limited to explaining and predicting account-ing practice. These factors have, at the same time,

directed the ingenuity of researchers away fromimproving practice towards sophistication of research method, and stressed understanding of accounting as a present-timeless phenomenon.Specic accounting changes are viewed as essen-tially exogenous events triggering market reactions,or at best are explained ahistorically in terms of exogenously given preferences of economic actorsat a point in time.

Historical myth-making

However, in certain circumstances, bothaccounting scholars and practitioners have beenwilling to mobilize historical arguments. Account-ing standard-setters frequently provide a narrationof the evolution of accounting for particularissues, although such a narration is more oftenan exposition of historical materials than a fullyarticulated history ( Young & Mouck, 1996,p. 133), and tends to present the particularaccounting pronouncement as the inevitable culmi-nation of this process of evolution. Early writers

of treatises on double-entry bookkeeping, nascentprofessional accountancy bodies and pioneeringaccounting academics appealed to accountingsancient roots as a way of raising the status of theiractivities (Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p. 10 ), at atime when demonstrating a distinguished ancestrywas believed to confer status. With hindsight, thisearly historiography might be presented as myth-building, and three myths in particular are worthidentifying. First is the myth of double-entry book-keeping as the technical end of accounting, sec-

ond is the myth of the accounting profession asapplying learning to practice in the service of cli-ents and public, and third is the myth of accountingas a crucial factor in the emergence and develop-ment of capitalism. It is important to stress that,by using the word myth, I am not wishing to pre- judge the truth or falsity of the factual claimsunderlying these stories, but rather to suggest thatthey were ways in which particular groups and indi-viduals made sense of their current position by ref-erence to stories about the past.

3 Actually, there is remarkably little research that investigatesthe extent to which the stylized methods and techniques of theaccounting text-book are indeed those of the businesses and

other entities that are portrayed and modelled in the text-bookspages. The question of whether accounting text-books simplyreect an external world or actually constitute a pedagogicdomain, in which the balance sheet always balances, everyvariance has an explanation, and all decisions have a singleoutcome, would be worth studying.

4 It is possible that the term archival-empirical, which rstappeared in Journal of Accounting Research in 1988, isattributable to the then editor, Katherine Schipper. Thearchive is in practice constituted by computer data bases,the instability of which for replicating research has beenexplored by Bamber, Christensen, and Gaver (2000, pp. 126 127).



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At least the rst two of these myths wereendorsed most notably (within the anglophone lit-erature of accounting history) by Littleton. As he

claimed, in a much-quoted passage:Accounting is relative and progressive. Thephenomena which form its subject matterare constantly changing. Older methodsbecome less effective under altered condi-tions; earlier ideas become irrelevant in theface of new problems. Thus surroundingconditions generate fresh ideas and stimulatethe ingenious to advise new methods. And assuch ideas and methods prove successful theyin turn begin to modify the surrounding con-

ditions. The result we call progress ( Little-ton, 1933, p. 361).

Although this concedes that accounting mayhave some impact on the context within which itoperates, accounting change is regarded essentiallyas a function of environmental change. Explana-tions of accounting change are couched in termsof tracing the inuence of exogenous factors;accounting is not seen as in any sense autonomous.A broad periodization of accounting change fol-lows from this, with the economic expansion of

the Italian renaissance providing the conditionsfor emergence of double-entry, the industrial revo-lution stimulating the emergence of more detailedcost recording, and the growth of the corporationcreating a demand for nancial statements, exter-nal audit and professional accountants ( Carnegie& Napier, 1996, p. 12).

Although this periodization provides a set of environmental changes against which accountingchanges may be projected, it tends to over-sim-plify: what, for example do we mean by the

industrial revolution ( Bryer, 2005)? Moreover,as accounting researchers increasingly locatedthemselves (in countries such as the UK andUSA) as social scientists, mere coincidence of an environmental change and an accountingchange did not convince as an adequate explana-tion of the accounting change: it was not enoughto claim that A caused B, scholars wanted toknow why A caused B. Perhaps historians of accounting behaved as other socially-oriented his-torians, who, as Megill (1989, pp. 630631) has

suggested, tended to be inuenced by contempo-rary views of the methods of science. Theyregarded explanation as adequate only if individ-

ual events could be shown to be the consequenceof general laws, and viewed observed phenom-ena as merely surface traces of some deep real-ity. If so, the general laws that were used toexplain accounting were economic ones. Entre-preneurs and accountants were characterized asrational economic men, choosing accountingtechniques that operated in a cost-effectivemanner in their eternal quest for prot, wealth,or utility. As information gathering, manipulationand use comes to be seen as a costly process, itbecomes subject to the same economic calculusas the rational economic man is assumed toapply to all his other choices. The costs of a par-ticular information system, and the benets thatthe system will generate, will depend on a diver-sity of factors, such as the efficiency of marketsand technologies of communication and calcula-tion, leavened by individual ingenuity. Changesin these factors (for example, the emergence of new productive technologies that make transac-tions through markets relatively more costly thaninternal organization) revise the costbenet

equation. Individuals, constantly in search of prot maximization, will actively seek out inno-vative information systems, including accounting.If they do not, then the force of competition willmake them extinct. We may presume, merelyfrom the fact that a method survives and domi-nates, that it is economically superior.

This is a powerful story, to those who accept thepower of economic explanations. It has becomeparticularly signicant with the emergence of transaction cost economics ( Coase, 1937; Dem-

setz, 1968; Williamson, 1979) and the conceptuali-zation of the rm as a nexus of contracts (Jensen& Meckling, 1976; Williamson, 1975, 1985).5 Theseconcepts formed important foundations for posi-tive accounting theory ( Watts & Zimmerman,1986), and indeed historical evidence has beenmobilized by Watts and Zimmerman (1983) to

5 It is perhaps ironic that the very rst historical paper to bepublished in AOS (Chandler & Daems, 1979 ) was rmly withinthis economic tradition.



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suggest the generality of their theory. However, it isthis very generality that helps to undermine thetransa ction cost explanation of accounting

change.6

If all accounting change is explicable interms of shifting balances of costs and benets,then we have what is at rst sight a powerful theorythat promises to be empirically testable. If we couldexamine and retraverse the economic calculationsmade by those choosing and changing theiraccounting methods, we could satisfy ourselvesthat they did indeed select their methods in orderto maximize prots, wealth, utility or whateverwe consider to be the appropriate maximand.But, as Hoskin and Macve (2000, pp. 106107)point out, we rarely have explicit evidence of sucheconomic calculations. Indeed, the economicexplanation of accounting change often turns outto be circular. Why does an entrepreneur adoptan accounting method? Because its economicallyoptimal. How do we know that its economicall yoptimal? Because the entrepreneur has adopted it. 7

This economic story of accounting change isprobably as much of a myth as any of the previousgeneration of explanations of accounting and itssignicance. However, to the extent that historicalaccounting research abuts other areas where eco-

nomic arguments are persuasive, and to the extentto which historical accounting researchers wish topersuade sceptical, mainstream business and eco-nomic historians that an understanding of accounting is vital, if not central, to their ownagendas (Hoskin & Macve, 2000, p. 104 ), the eco-nomic story needs to be borne in mind as one of the acceptable modes of explanation in thoseparallel disciplines.

If there is an underlying general explanation of accounting choice and accounting change, then

perhaps the accounting change that we observe isonly supercial. It may be the case, as Miller andNapier (1993, p. 632) express the argument, that

while the subject matter and methods of account-ing may mutate in response to external changes,there is nonetheless an essential core that can becontinue to be identied as accounting. Popularcandidates for this core might be stewardshipor accountability on the one hand and infor-mation for decision-making on the other. Theeconomic story of accounting change, by makingthe decision-maker a key character in the choiceof accounting method, tted well with a view thatthe proper and essential function of accountingwas to provide information useful for decision-making. By the 1950s and 1960s, the focus on deci-sion-usefulness as a key criterion for accounting toinvestors (developed by Staubus (1961) and othersand later to be endorsed in various ConceptualFramework projects) was to provide a criterionfor critique of accou nting practices of both thepresent and the past. 8 The other potential coreconcept, accountability, could be subsumed underdecision-making by couching issues of account-ability in terms of the decision to reward or penal-ize the steward, whether manager, agent,

employee, or company director. Whatever coreconcept was adopted as the essence of account-ing, historical researchers effectively endorsed theview that past accountings differed from presentaccountings only on the surface: the deep pur-pose and structure of accounting was seen asuniversal.

6 The transaction cost approach to accounting history hasalso been criticized by Tinker and Neimark (1988) .

7 David Oldroyd has pointed out to me that it is toodemanding to expect entrepreneurs to select the best of allpossible accounting methodsin practice, they may simplysatisce and select what they believe to be the best from thelimited set of methods of which they have knowledge. This maybe a very limited set indeed, and there will be cases whereentrepreneurs simply perceive no alternative to the method theyactually use.

8 The group of scholars at the London School of Economics

before and after the Second World War, including RonaldEdwards, William Baxter, David Solomons and Harold Edey,were not only strong critics of historical cost accounting andtraditional full costing as providing information useful fordecision-making, but were important contributors to historicalliteratures of accounting (for example, Baxter, 1956; Edey &Panitpakdi, 1956; Edwards, 1937; Solomons, 1952 ), while BasilYamey, a professional economist rather than an accountant,worked extensively to debunk the Sombart thesis thataccounting was central to the development of capitalism. AsYamey (1964), p. 638 concluded, Systematic accounting of past business results has a decidedly limited part to play inbusiness decision-making.



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Traditional motivations for historical accounting research

To many accounting scholars, this made histor-ical accounting research largely redundant. If thewish was to elucidate the deep structure of accounting, it appeared less difficult, and more rel-evant, to strip away the surface of todays account-ing phenomena, which at least were readilyaccessible, rather than to acquire the technicalskills necessary to gain most from using historicalarchives. If we already know the answer weexpect to ndthat accounting methods and prac-tices are the outcome of a rational economicchoicethen we might as well leave the account-ing archives to social, economic and businesshistorians to use as data for their particular inves-tigations. However, historical accounting researchstill took place, and various motivations may bediscerned:

1. Some researchers simply found the past inter-esting for its own sake. Such an attitude,when it restricts itself to an interest in curiousand arcane facts, has been lab elled as anti-quarian ( Napier, 1989, p. 243 ).9 Antiquarian-

ism, in terms of the systematic collection of material from the past, was a forerunner of scientic history emerging around thebeginning of the 19th century, and it contin-ues to provide an important evidential foun-dation for general historical research. Thissometimes takes the form of patient transcrip-tion of archival materials, sometimes the loca-tion of isolated historical facts that,together with others, can be utilized in moregeneral studies. However, an interest in the

past for its own sake often celebrates theirregular rather than the typical, and this

raises issues of generalizability that may bemore of a concern to a social scientistthan to a general historian ( Fleischman, Mills,

& Tyson, 1996; Mills, 1993b; Oldroyd,1999).2. Other researchers considered that present

accounting phenomena could be fully under-stood only with knowledge of how these phe-nomena came about. Apparent peculiarities of contemporary practice might have their originin some past practice that made sense at thetime but has persisted into contexts in which itmight no longer make sense. An example of thisis Yameys study of why in the British balancesheet . . . the assets are placed on the right-handside and the liabilities and capital balances onthe left-hand side of the statement ( Yamey,1970, p. 71). Yamey sets out to explain why19th century parliamentary draftsmen chosethis arrangement, and why it might not havelooked surprising, odd, incorrect or improperto many of their contemporaries in the busi-ness and accountancy worlds ( Yamey, 1970,p. 71).

3. A third strand of historical accounting researchwas the attempt to debunk myths of account-

ings involvement in the emergence of Westerncapitalism. The contribution of Yamey to thisdebate has been of lasting inuence ( Yamey,1949, 1964, 1975), even though it has been heav-ily criticized (for example, by Miller & Napier,1993).

4. A fourth strand considered that study of accountings past might be useful in helping toresolve technical accounting problems of thepresent. This is the utilitarian end of account-ing history identied by the American Account-

ing Associations Committee on AccountingHistory, which claimed that history throwslight on the origins of concepts, practices andinstitutions in use today, yielding insight forthe solution of modern accounting problems(Committee on Accounting History, 1970, p.53).

5. Finally, as already noted, some researcherswished to develop general theories of account-ing change in terms of response to environmen-tal change (Littleton, 1933 ).

9 Chambers English Dictionary (1990) denes an antiquarianas one who studies, collects, or deals in relics of the past, butnot usually very ancient thingscuriosities rather than objectsof serious archaeological interest. A rare example of a purelyantiquarian paper in AOS is the note by Rorke (1982) on catvaluation in medieval Wales.



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The state of historical accounting research by1975 can be discerned from the bibliographiesprepared by Parker. His select bibliography

of accounting history published in the rst issueof Abacus (Parker, 1965) listed 231 items thathad appeared over the previous several decades.His listing made no claims to being a completebibliography (he excluded articles which in myopinion add little or nothing to our understand-ing and knowledge of accounting history Par-ker, 1965, p. 62) but is nonetheless mostilluminating. Of the items listed , all but about20 are in the English language. 10 Just under ahundred address the ancient and earlyperiods (roughly before the mid-18th century).The inuence of Basil Yamey is unmissable, con-tributing 19 of the items listed. Parker subse-quently updated his bibliography to 1980 andagain to 1987. These updates show a rapidgrowth in the volume of historical accountingresearch, but this must be viewed against abackground of comparable growth in mostresearch elds within accounting ( Parker, 1980,1988).

This growing corpus of historical accountingresearch had its own questions and agendas,but the emergence of new research directionsaround the organizational and social aspects of accounting in the 1970s provided a context forraising different questions. Attempts to providericher understandings of accounting in its organi-zational and social contexts emphasized the need

to get to grips with accounting change. And inBritain in the 1970s, change appeared to be apervasive phenomenon. A rapidly growing

accountancy profession, moving into many newareas, a new standard-setting process, interven-tion by government in the ination accountingdebate, new forms of social accounting, greateruse of accounting controls in both private andpublic-sector enterprises, calls on accounting tochange in diverse directionsall of these devel-opments called for analysis. As Hopwood(1985, p. 365) put it, the questions were: Howhad accounting become what it now is? Howcan we understand the processes of change?How have wider issues and concerns impactedon accounting practice?

Although questions such as these appeared tobe rmly on the agenda of the then contemporaryhistorical accounting research programme, thenature and direction of work being undertakenin the name of accounting history did notseem to provide the kind of understanding beingsought:

There has been a tendency for technical his-tories of accounting to be written in isolationof their social, economic and institutionalcontexts. Accounting seemingly has beenabstracted from its social domain with manyof the understandings that are availabletending to present a view of the autonomousand unproblematic development of the tech-nical. Where efforts have been made to offeralternative perspectives, teleological, evolu-tionary or progressive notions of changehave often been implicit in the understand-ings presented. . . . [C]riticisms of suchnotions of history in the social sciences . . .

and the availability of other, albeit often con-icting, appreciations of the dynamics of his-torical change . . . [highlighted] the partial,uncritical, atheoretical and intellectually iso-lated nature of much historical work in theaccounting area ( Hopwood, 1985, p. 366 ).

By contrast, the desire to understand contem-porary pressures for accounting change suggesteda more specic agenda of questions: How hadthe social been intertwined with the accountings

10

Parker (1993) has recently warned against an excessiveAnglocentrism in historical accounting research that ignoresthe substantial contributions that continue to be made inlanguages other than English. Among the specialist accountinghistory journals, Accounting , Business and Financial History hasbeen particularly anxious to make Anglophone scholars awareof historical accounting research in languages other thanEnglish, through review articles surveying particular countriesliteratures (for example, Herna ndez-Esteve, 1995, on Spain andCamfferman, 1997, on the Netherlands) and the publication of special issues of studies by researchers from France ( Boyns &Nikitin, 2001; Parker, Lemarchand, & Boyns, 1997 ), Japan(Chiba & Cooke, 2001) and Spain (Boyns & Carmona, 2002 ).



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of the past and the present? What factors hadbeen forceful mobilizers of accounting change?And what roles had accounting played in both

the construction and realization of the domainsof the social and the political? (Hopwood,1985, p. 366). Answers to these questionscould not be expected from the existing projectof historical accounting research: what wasneeded was no less than a new accountinghistory.

The new accounting history

Because accounting researchers are not nor-mally trained as historians, they are not necessarilyaware of methodological debates in mainstreamhistoriography. While the description newaccounting history has echoes of the new his-tory that emerged in various different locationsand contexts during the 20th century, it shouldnot be assumed that new accounting history issimply new history of accounting. Also, newhistory is itself not an unambiguous term. TheNew Historians of the USA in the early years

of the 20th centuryincluding Frederick JacksonTurner, Charles Beard, James H. Robinson andCarl Beckeremphasized variously the impor-tance of social and economic conicts and the roleof ideas in understanding American history(Iggers, 1997, p. 42; Novick, 1988, pp. 8893),although without wanting to convert history intoa social science. On the other hand, Gaffikin(1998, pp. 633635, following Burke, 1991, pp.39) identies the new history as coming fromthe Annales school led by Marc Bloch and Lucien

Febvre (Clark, 1985). This tended to approach thepast anthropologically, with a stress on structuresrather than individuals, and drew on disciplinessuch as geography and demography as much aseconomics and sociology. More generally, newhistory often connotes histories from below,rather than a focus on political and diplomatic his-tory, on monarchs and wars, and as a corollarytends to draw on wider sources than writtenrecords in official archives. Practitioners of thenew history are often more conscious of

epistemolo gical issues than their more traditionalcolleagues, 11 considering the claim that there arehistorical facts about which we can reach objec-

tive conclusions as needing to be justied ratherthan being taken for granted.Certainly all of these aspects appear to a greater

or lesser extent in much of the research identiedas forming the new accounting history, but justas new history does not connote a singleresearch programme or method, nor does newaccounting history:

The new accounting history . . . does not rep-resent a unitary research programme withdenite theoretical boundaries. It can be seen

instead as a loose assemblage of often quitedisparate research questions and issues(Miller, Hopper, & Laughlin, 1991, p. 396 ).

However, research within the new accountinghistory tends to differ from the more traditionalhistorical accounting research in a number of ways. Not all of these differences appear in everyexample of the new accounting history, and someof the differences are of degree rather than kind,but taken together they characterize a substantialnew direction.

Accounting as constitutive as well as reective

To new accounting historians, the claim thatthe purpose of accounting is to reect a pre-exist-ing and independent economic reality (whetherthis is presented as a descriptive statement of

11 This is by no means to assert that traditional historiansare casual about the status of their knowledge claims, but ratherto suggest that the possibility of objective historical knowl-

edge as at least an ideal end of the research process isfundamental to such historians. For example, the leadingBritish historian Richard Evans, at the end of a critique of postmodernist theorists of history, proclaims: I will lookhumbly at the past and say despite them all: it really happened,and we really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful andself-critical, nd out how it happened and reach some tenablethough always less than nal conclusions about what it allmeant (Evans, 1997, p. 253). Issues of evidence are perceivedas craft questions of historical research practice, rather thanphilosophical questions about the possibility of knowledge of the past. (For a comment on Evans in the context of historicalaccounting research, see Napier, 2002 ).



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how accounting actually functions or a normativetarget for an ideal accounting system to aim at)is considered na ve. If we regard accounts as mir-

rors of economy, we have a readily-availableexplanation for accounting change: it simplyreects change in the external economic environ-ment. Perhaps (to develop the analogy) we needfrom time to time to develop more sophisticatedtelescopes and microscopes to be able to cap-ture more complex economic environments, butthis is essentially a technical problem. Moreover,we can aspire to develop optical instrumentsof accounting that lead to minimal distortion, sothat accounting information is produced for usersin a neutral manner. The limits of technicalaccounting sophistication would also depend onthe external economic environment, reectingwhat users of the information (whether inside oroutside organizations) were prepared to bear inthe way of costs.

While traditional views of accounting may con-cede that particular accounting numbers, ideasand methods may have an effect on their environ-ment, the predominant direction of inuence isfrom the environment to accounting. It is impor-tant to observe that the categories environment

and accounting tend to be presented as distinct:accounting is viewed as a well-dened and lim-ited set of practices, leading to particular docu-ments and actions, with everything else formingthe environment. However, one of the majorrecognitions of recent years within the accountingresearch community is that accounting is not justreective but constitutive: it is not merely a passiveeffect of its environment but works to shape thisenvironment. The constitutive power of account-ing arises not just in the context of the individual

organization, but also in a wider social context.In the organization, accounting makes possibleparticular modes of action, such as budgeting,but also shapes the organization itself, for exampleas a hierarchy of cost centres. More particularly,accounting helps to make things visible within anorganization, not in a neutral sense of enablingmore precise and detailed management in rationalpursuit of unproblematic economic goals butrather to make possible the pursuit of economicgoals in the rst place:

A regime of economic visibility and calcula-tion has positively enabled the creation andoperation of an organization which facilitates

the exercising of particular social conceptionsof power. Economic motives have been madereal and inuential by their incorporationinto legitimate and accepted economic facts.The labour process in the organization hasbeen exposed, ordered and physically andsocially distributed. The resultant organiza-tional facts, calculations, schedules and planshave positively enabled the construction of amanagement regime abstracted and distancedfrom the operation of the work process itself (Hopwood, 1987, p. 213 ).

Hopwoods discussion of the accounting inno-vations of Josiah Wedgwood in the 1770s ( Hop-wood, 1987, pp. 214218; Hopwood, 1992, pp.131135), and the examination by Carmona, Ezz-amel, and Gutie rrez (1997) of the Spanish RoyalTobacco Factory around the same period of timeprovide specic case studies of how accountingrenders calculable and visible the activities, andhence the accountability, of individuals in thework place (Carmona et al., 1997, p. 443 ). Other

studies of accountings role within the organiza-tion in making things visible and thereby workingto shape the organization itself will be examinedlater in this paper.

Accountings constitutive role is not limited tothe organizational level. Accounting, understoodbroadly as economic calculation, plays an impor-tant role in constituting society as economic.While accounting may mutate and migrate inthe name of some economic discourse (such asefficiency, choice or the market), changing

in form and location, the availability of account-ing practices and their application in new con-texts may itself lead to shifts in economicdiscourses and the ways in which these discoursesshape, and are shaped by, the social ( Hopwood,1992). Examinations of accountings role not justas a by-product of social change but also as a setof practices and ideas that can be mobilized toachieve (or inhibit) social change may take a rel-atively contemporary issue (such as the study byBurchell et al. (1985), of value added statements



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in the UK) or a slightly more distant one, but ineither case it is reasonable, given the use of nar-rative form and archival evidence, to consider

such studies as examples of historical accountingresearch. While there have been several otherstudies (discussed below) that attempt to investi-gate accounting change in a broad social context,perhaps the sheer potential breadth of such inves-tigations is inhibiting. Moreover, there have beenfew studies that examine in depth the role of accounting in national economic calculation,despite the notion of an accounting complexdeveloped in the context of a review of nationalaccounting and planning in France by Miller(1986) and an awareness of the relationshipbetween government and calculation delineatedby Rose (1991). Napier (1996, pp. 467468) hasdocumented how National Income Accountingin the UK, despite early involvement of profes-sional accountants, tended to become the domainof economists and statisticians. However,National Income Accounting nonetheless makesvisible certain aspects of social and economicactivity (and conceals other aspects), and there-fore helps to constitute policy-makers views of a society. Accounting may, therefore, have an

important constitutive role that has scarcely beenanalyzed yet by historical accounting researchers(but see Suzuki, 2003a, 2003b, for an importantexception).

Broadening conceptions of accounting

Miller and Napier (1993) have pointed out theextent to which traditional historical accountingresearch privileged double-entry bookkeeping inits investigations of accountings past. An impor-

tant aspect of the new accounting history hasbeen a broadening out of accounting. With hind-sight, the rationalization of this broadening out(see for example Miller & Napier, 1993, p. 632)may have had a degree of special pleading aboutit, reecting attempts to transcend lines of demarcation within the academy, but at the sametime the process of bringing a wide range of apparently diverse practices under the headingof accounting was reective of changes inaccountancy practice in countries such as the

UK and the USA, as large accountancy rmsmoved into increasingly diverse areas of activityfrom the 1960s onwards, while the scope of the

accounting function in organizations itself expanded. Within the new accounting history,accounting is viewed as a subset of a broader cat-egory of calculation, the limits of which are leftdeliberately vague. This reects the antiessen-tialist nature of the new accounting history,and an awareness that the bundle of practices(calculative or otherwise) that happen to belabelled as accounting at any point in time andspace is contingent (and delineating a specicbundle and documenting the conditions of itsemergence provides a problem for historicalaccounting research).

New accounting history has therefore exam-ined such calculative practices as discounted cashow (Miller, 1991) and insurance ( Knights &Vurdubakis, 1993 ), while more contemporarystudies of the interaction of calculation andrepresentation from computer-assisted design(Miller & OLeary, 1993, p. 201) to the spatiallayou t of the factory (Miller & OLeary,1994)12 could inspire comparable studies of earlier sites of economic activity (for example,

Carmona et al., 1997, 2002). The importanttheme of scientic and engineering calculationsand their interface with costing has already beenexplored in the context of the Scientic Manage-ment movement by Miller and OLeary (1987),but with an emphasis on measuring, controlling,

12 This study has been criticized by Arnold (1997) and Froud

et al. (1997), and defended by Miller and OLeary (1997). Itexemplies the extent to which traditional interests of account-ing research such as recording of nancial transactions andmeasurement of cost are transcended by broadening theunderstanding of accounting to embrace wider forms of economic calculation. One has to search very carefully in theexposition of Caterpillars programme for a Plant with a Futureto discern the ways in which, for example roles and practicesof factory accounting were densely interrelated with ways of arranging and mapping out space in Caterpillars plants(Miller & OLeary, 1994, p. 25). Accounting no longer standsout in contrast to a distinct environment but constitutes and isconstituted by the environment.



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and normalizing labour time. Explorations of calculation relating to physical engineering per-formance of machines, and links with economic

calculation, have been undertaken by Fleisch-man, Hoskin, and Macve (1995) , and provide apotentially fruitful area for further research.Notions of engineering efficiency and economicefficiency, the accountings and calculations neces-sary to make these notions real, and the inter-ventions that become possible in the name of efficiency, could underpin a research domain atthe intersection of accounting, production engi-neering and information systems.

Widening arenas for accounting

The recognition of accounting as an organiza-tional and social phenomenon has carried with itan expansion of the arenas in which accountingis understood. So long as accounting change isregarded as the modication of technique inresponse to changes in an exogenous environment,and so long as the extent of accounting is restrictedto traditional record-keeping, the accounting phe-nomenon can be viewed as rather local. Account-ing change can be seen as technical improvement,

explicable as a better way of achieving a pre-givengoal (where the criteria by which the success orfailure of change is assessed are internal ones).However, broadening out our understanding of accounting by identifying it as social as much astechnical locates accounting in wider arenas.Moreover, instead of regarding accounting as amatter of individual choice by stylized decision-makers, or as essentially a matter of individualaccountability (for example, by a manager to anowner), new accounting history brings into its

exposition new actors: the state, institutions suchas employer collectives and trade unions, the acad-emy, the media, and so on.

One important theme running through someparts of the new accounting history is that of thepolitical economy of accounting. The mobiliza-tion of this notion arose alongside the seminalpaper by Burchell, Clubb, Hopwood, Hughes,and Nahapiet (1980) The roles of accounting inorganizations and society. Not only did thispaper propose a consciously iconoclastic research

agenda (we believe . . . that it is important at leastto start questioning what has not been questionedand thereby possibly to make problematic what

may have been taken for granted Burchellet al., 1980, p. 6), but it rmly advocated a histor-ical approach:

There is, we think, a real need for more his-torical studies of the development of accounting. Just how has accounting cometo function as we now know it? What socialissues and agents have been involved withits emergence and development? How has itbecome intertwined with other aspects of social life? And what consequences might it

be seen as having had? (Burchell et al.,1980, p. 23).

Finally, it warned, Such enquiries call for the-oretical as well as methodological innovation(Burchell et al., 1980, p. 23).

In the same issue as the Burchell et al. paper,Tinker (1980) introduced the term political econ-omy of accounting in his study of a single com-pany over a period of nearly half a century. Thisstudy provided an illustration of how accountingas practised relies heavily on the marginalism fun-

damental to neo-classical economics, and how adifferent economicspolitical economywouldinspire a different accounting. In his comment onthis paper, Cooper (1980) identied one of thepotential criticisms of the use of historicalapproaches in the social sciences: the problem of generalizability from a single case study. Cooperhimself, with Sherer, was to go on to argue infavour of the political economy of accounting(PEA) approach, which they saw as exhibitingthree central features: a recognition of power

and conict in society, an awareness of the spe-cic historical and social environment withinwhich accounting operates, and the adoption of a more emancipated view of human motivationand the role of accounting in society, that is, aview that acknowledges the potential of people(and accounting) to change and reect differinginterests and concerns ( Cooper & Sherer, 1984,pp. 218219). Also in the PEA tradition, with astrong appeal to historical understandings, wasthe critique of Positive Accounting Theory by



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progress of women have persisted throughout thecentury. Kirkham (1992) follows up Lehmansresearch by arguing for an integration of gender

studies . . .

into the central questions of the disci-pline (p. 295). With Loft, she attempts to achievethis through a discussion of how the constructionof the notion of the professional accountant couldbe seen as a successful attempt to dene womenout of accountancy, at a time when occupationssuch as clerk and bookkeeper were increasinglybecoming a female domain, by setting up rigid dis-tinctions between the accountant and thebookkeeper (Kirkham & Loft, 1993 ). Adamsand Harte (1998) conduct a longitudinal study of corporate nancial reports to examine the positionof women in the British banking and retail sectors,suggesting a persistence of patriarchal attitudes onthe part of management. Cooper and Taylor(2000) use a perspective grounded in Marx andBraverman to examine the increasing feminizationof more clerical aspects of accounting, and theextent to which this corresponds with deskilling.

Issues of gender could also be tied up with thoseof race, as Hammond and Streeter (1994, p. 281)show in the context of attempts of AfricanAmer-icans to enter the US accountancy profession.

Race and ethnicity are also features of studies of accountings impact on the Maori in New Zealand(Hooper & Kearins, 1997 ) and Native Americansin Canada ( Neu, 2000) and the United States(Preston & Oakes, 2001 ), while Hammond (1997)follows up her earlier study with Streeter to exam-ine AfricanAmerican public accountants from themid-1960s until the 1980s. Gender issues have beenraised in the context of historical method andoverall approach. Hammond and Sikka (1996)note the potential of oral history as a way of ensur-

ing that womens voices are heard.15

More radi-cally, Cooper and Puxty (1996) claim that manyaccounting histories are trapped within a malelogocentric tradition (p. 306). They attempt tosubvert the belief that it is possible to write author-

itative accounting history (p. 287), using fourcase studies (Hopwood, 1987; Johnson, 1981;Nobes, 1982; Tinker & Neimark, 1987 ). The focus

thereby shifts from history as the discovery andexposition of facts about the past to modes of historical writing, of which one of the most inu-ential modes within the new accounting historyhas been that of genealogy.

Genealogies of calculation

Although only a minority of contributions tothe new accounting history are written from aFoucauldian perspective, these writings have hada possibly disproportionate impact on historio-graphical debates within accounting research. AsMiller and Napier (1993, p. 633) point out, weneed to attend to the piecemeal fashion in whichvarious calculative technologies have beeninvented and assembled, rather than look forimmobile forms that appear to move without diffi-culty across space and time. This implies that weshould not expect to identify common structures inrespect to particular historical problems, and thispoint has been stressed in different ways in twoof the pioneering contributions within this

approach, Burchell et al. (1985) and Miller(1991). Burchell et al. locate their study of valueadded in the UK by reference to three arenas:accounting standards, macro-economic manage-ment, and industrial relations and information dis-closure. Value added reporting emerges (andsubsequently disappears) as these arenas shift,with problems being identied at certain times towhich value added is perceived as the solution,only for the problems to mutate and possibly dis-solve. They introduce the notion of the account-

ing constellation, a very particular eld of relations which existed between certain institu-tions, economic and administrative processes,bodies of knowledge, systems of norms and mea-surements, and classication techniques (p.400). Accounting constellations are not generalformations but are specic to particular problems.However, delineating a specic constellationaround a problem may provide a general methodof analysis, a way into an appreciation of the net-work of intersecting practices, processes and insti-

15 Use of oral history techniques is not restricted to the newaccounting history: Tyson (1994) interviewed garment workers,many of whom were women, as part of his investigation into therole of cost accounting in labour negotiations in the US mensclothing industry.



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tutions (p. 400) against which new accountingsemerge and mutate.

This view of genealogy as providing not a gen-

eral model but rather inducing specic narrationsis shared by Miller (1991). He studies the advocacyof discounted cash ow (DCF) in the UK in the1950s and 1960s as a means of achieving betterinvestment decision-making. This is not an exami-nation of the technical efficacy of DCF, nor is it asurvey of how widely DCF was in fact adopted,but rather it is an attempt to examine howaccounting change and innovation occurs not sim-ply as a technical response to problems within theenterprise but can occur beyond the enterprise.The specic mode of conceptualizing the link-ages between apparently distant elements of theaccounting constellation or accounting com-plex is through four elements. First, problemati-zations identify the moment at which:

[T]he real problems or difficulties certainorganizations face in implementing newaccounting systems, or . . . the difficultiesencountered in operating existing systems . . .come to be identied as intrinsic to a partic-ular calculative regime, when these difficul-ties come to be endowed with a widermeaning and signicance than that of theirdeployment in particular organizations, andwhen an alternative technology can beappealed to as resolving these difficulties ina manner congruent with their wider per-ceived signicance (Miller, 1991, p. 737).

Programmes, the second element, are themore general issues, such as economic growth,with which particular ideas and practices becomeconnected. There is nothing inevitable about the

linkage between a programme and a specic calcu-lative practice, so we cannot simply deduce that agiven programme calls forth that practice.Hence concern with economic growth may be arecurring programme of government, but there isno necessity that it will always be linked withDCF. The third and fourth elements, transla-tion and action at a distance, show the inu-ence of Latour (1987) on Miller. Translationprovides a way of conceptualizing the move-ment between different persons and places,

whereby ideas and practices emerging in one con-text may be reinterpreted in an apparently differentcontext, until the linkage can appear self-evident

rather than merely contingent. Latours notion of translation has been used in particular by Robson(1991) to provide an understanding of the emer-gence of the UKs standard-setting programmeat the end of the 1960s. Action at a distanceis, as Robson (1992, 1994) has argued, a key met-aphor for how accounting can work, throughallowing indirect rather than direct interventionas calculative techniques make visible what is notunder direct gaze. Miller states that he is not givinga formal model that species certain invariantentities or theoretical categories (1991, p. 758),and this reluctance to impose a general model ona specic problem or event is characteristic of agenealogical approach.

Miller and Napier (1993) stress two furtherelements of genealogies of calculation. One of these, the concern with ensembles of practicesand rationales, has already been mentioned.The other is the discursive nature of calculation .The investigator attempts to tease out the mean-ings given to particular modes of calculation bythose promoting and using those calculations. It

is important to note that these are not our mean-ings or interpretations, and often the archive willbe mute on the meanings (if any) of practiceswhose traces are embodied in our evidence. Itis perhaps this reluctance to impose meaning onthe archive that critics of Foucauldianapproaches to historical accounting research ndmost difficult to accept, and indeed such a meth-odological practice can appear to be a tacitendorsement of the status quo ( Neimark, 1990,1994). Concern with calculation as discursive is

important because:The vocabularies and ideals associated withparticular ways of calculating enable suchtechnologies to be depicted as a solution tothis problem or that, to be disseminatedthrough textbooks and various pedagogicand popular mechanisms, to be embodiedin the syllabuses of various expert bodiesand appealed to as arbiters of economic real-ity (Miller & Napier, 1993, p. 633 ).



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Broadening accounting into more general eco-nomic calculation, considering the conditions of possibility for the emergence of accounting prac-

tices, locating calculation as a discursive practice,and considering ensembles of practices and ratio-nales have tended to relocate the focus of research away from the detailed technical prac-tices themselves to the discourses in which thesepractices are located at a particular point or per-iod in time. 16 They appeal for their evidentialbase to a different archive rather than beingnon-archival. Although some of the archival evi-dence would be regarded as secondary sourcesfor studies of accounting techniques, they are pri-mary sources for rationales, meanings and inter-pretations (while, as already noted, the primaryaccounts themselves may be opaque as to whatcalculat ions meant and how their outcomes wereused). 17

Overall, then, the new accounting history hasexpanded considerably the domain of historicalinterest, utilized different approaches to historicalwriting, highlighted the wide contexts in whichaccounting operates and the diversity of actorsemploying, and being acted on, by accounting.To elucidate further the contribution of the new

accounting history, I now identify three thematic

areas in which signicant work has been under-taken. In each of these areas, AOS has without adoubt transformed the nature of historical, and

more general, debate within the accounting litera-ture. Following this, I shall provide a generalappraisal of the success or otherwise of the newaccounting history in providing us with viableaccounts of change.

Themes in the new accounting history

Accounting, power and knowledge

One of the most important sources of writingswithin the new accounting history has been the ser-ies of Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accountingconferences held triennially in Manchester since1985. Three papers presented at the rst of theseconferences formed a special issue of Accounting ,Organizations and Society in 1986 under the head-ing Accounting, Knowledge, Power. Two of thepapers (Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Loft, 1986 ) wereamong the earliest contributions, along with Burc-hell et al. (1985), to the accounting literature ma k-

ing extensive use of the work Michel Foucault.18

As noted in the previous section, much researchof a Foucauldian nature in the accounting litera-ture attempts to identify (or construct) networksof people, principles and practices (accountingconstellations) and to show how accounting canbe caught in such networks. Juxtaposition of seemingly remote settings in which accountingoperates in taken for granted, apparently unprob-lematical ways could help to locate accounting in abroader social context, and also reveal howaccounting, far from being a neutral instrumentof economic recording and measurement, wasimplicated in power relationships. Hoskin andMacve (1986), in a tour de force of scholarship,

16 An important exception to this is the examination by Jeacleand Walsh (2002), Jeacle (2003), and Walsh and Jeacle (2003) of the use of accounting and other calculative techniques in thedepartment store sector in the rst half of the 20th century.These researchers study in detail accounting methods (such asthe retail inventory method) that have traditionally beenpresented in textbooks as purely technical, and bring out theways in which the adoption of such apparently mundanemethods changed the social and economic relationshipsbetween different groups (such as managers and buyers) within

the sector.17 Recently, Hoskin and Macve (2000, p. 106) have quitecorrectly observed that It is not generally possible to deducefrom the existence of the routine, formal accounting recordsthemselves the purpose or purposes to which the informationwas put. Yes, logically, but some historians will consider itpart of their function to provide at least tentative suggestions(Napier, 1989, p. 241). As long as these are agged up ashypotheses, and are proffered only where a search for possibleevidence to resolve the issue one way or another has provedfruitless, the benet to the debate may outweigh the danger thatsubsequent readers will take imaginative suggestions as claimsof fact.

18 The rst citation of Foucault appeared in Burchell et al.(1980, p. 7), albeit only in a footnote, and in the strangecompany of Popper and Kuhn. Gendron and Baker (2005) haverecently investigated the contexts within which the ideas of Foucault began to inuence research in accounting in the late1970s.



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claim that double-entry bookkeeping (which tradi-tional historians had explained as a graduallyevolving technique best tted to solve the

recording problems of the medieval Italian mer-chant) was an aspect of textual rewritings gener-ated as part of the disciplinary techniques of elitemedieval universities. They see a calculative ten-dency feeding back into educational processes inthe 18th and early 19th centuries, and mostfamously link the adoption of totalizing markingsystems in US educational institutions, of whichthe US Military Academy at West Point is themost crucial, as providing the genesis of manage-rialism through the involvement of West Pointgraduates in the management of commercial orga-nizations such as the railroads.

Hoskin and Macve (1986, p. 197) draw on Fou-caults notion of the calculable man ( Foucault,1977, p. 193), which also motivates Miller andOLeary (1987) in their analysis of the construc-tion of the governable person. This paperattempts to reinterpret the emergence and develop-ment of standard costing and budgeting, not as arened technique for more efficient management(although they do not deny that this was a practi-cal outcome of the development process), but

rather as an important calculative practice whichis part of a much wider modern apparatus of power which emerges conspicuously in the earlyyears of [the 20th] century (Miller & OLeary,1987, p. 235). The paper was partly motivated bya desire to address an attempt to mobilize a moretraditional view of accounting history to supportclaims that US manufacturing business was fail-ing because of the rejection of efficient costingand management accounting methods that haddeveloped in the late 19th and early 20th century

in favour of nancial accounting methods ( Kap-lan, 1984).19 Miller and OLeary link standardcosting with such phenomena as a discourse of national efficiency in both the UK and USA,pragmatic philosophies supporting an idea of

rational public administration, the notion of intel-ligence testing, eugenics, and mental hygiene,interlinked movements centring on the notion of

measurement of the individual in the cause of thesocial. From this viewpoint, standard costing,rather than standing by itself as an isolatedaccounting technique of greater or lesser function-ality, is part of an ensemble of practices andrationales.

Critiquing the Johnson and Kaplan thesis hasalso motivated Hopper and Armstrong (1991) toattack what they see as the marriage betweenaccounting antiquarianism and the doctrines of liberal economics (p. 405).20 Rejecting the useof transaction cost theorizing, Hopper and Arm-strong attempt to explain the stages in manage-ment accounting development that Johnson andKaplan articulate not in their terms of responseto shifting transaction cost structures but ratherin terms of changes in the labour process. Thusthe decline in internal labour contracting and itsreplacement with waged labour is seen as moti-vated by a desire to on the part of owners toappropriate the surplus gained by internal contrac-tors, even at the expense of increased costs (p. 416).Scientic management and standard costing are

also seen as aiding control of labour in the inter-ests of capital, with the basis of standard costs inthe engineering redesign and analysis of thelabour process intended to make such costsinvulnerable to the inuence of the workforce(p. 420).

While Hopper and Armstrong would stronglycriticize the Foucauldian tendency in accountinghistory (see for example Armstrong, 1994 ), theynote the contribution of Loft (1986), among othersworking within this and other tendencies ( Hopper

& Armstrong, 1991, p. 412 ). Lofts work is impor-tant in that it attempts to bring together several of the themes underlying the Foucauldian approach:

19 Kaplan relied heavily on the researches of Johnson, andthey were to collaborate on Relevance Lost (Johnson & Kaplan,1987).

20 For a criticism of Johnson and Kaplan from a Foucauldianperspective, see Ezzamel, Hoskin, and Macve (1990) . Jones andDugdale (2002) discuss the rise of Activity-Based Costing,noting the inuence of Johnson and Kaplan on this, andJohnsons subsequent move away from an interest in mecha-nistic accounting methods as management tools.



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knowledge, techniques, institutions and occupa-tional claims (Loft, 1986, p. 137). It is not justthe techniques of cost accounting that must be

studied (practices), but also how these techniquesappealed to and became embodied in distinctivediscourses (principles), and the ways in whichthose techniques and discourses could be and weremobilized by groups of individuals (people) inorder to achieve occupational status through pro-fessionalization. She brings out how accounting isnot just a product of society but is actively impli-cated in constituting that society:

The concept of an efficient cost-effectivenation was crucially dependent upon an

assumption that modern costing systemswould provide all the required information.Indeed in the nationalistic vision of a recon-structed efficient Britain can be seen the con-cept of an efficient business enterprise writlarge (Loft, 1986, p. 167).

If Miller and OLeary (1987) and Loft (1986)cast a Foucauldian spotlight on costing at thebeginning of the 20th century, Hoskin and Macve(1988), and later Walsh and Stewart (1993) , pro-vided a similar gaze over costing and managerial-

ism in the early to mid-1800s. Their claims toexplain the introduction of costing and managerialpractices in terms of the disciplinary gaze thataccounting was seen to provide have been chal-lenged through a series of archivally-based exam-inations of early costing records in both the UKand USA. A debate has developed between tradi-tionalists and new historians, often over theinterpret ation of the same archival and secondaryevidence.21 The contenders have even collabo-rated, rather inconclusively, in an attempt to carry

out a crucial experiment to determine whichapproach, a disciplinary or economic one, is betterable to explain and predict actual accounting prac-tices (Fleischman et al., 1995 ; see also Bryer, 2005,for a reinterpretation of their ndings). Explana-

tions of early costing and management accountingwill continue to be explored, but at present itseems unlikely that this theme will be an area of

major theoretical innovation in the immediatefuture.

The accountant and the allure of professionalization

Willmott (1986) was one of the earliest writersto attempt to get beyond the official histories of professional accountancy bodies in the UK inorder to apply ideas from the sociology of the pro-fessions. Instead of received stories that presentedthe professions as bodies established in the broadpublic interest, Willmott described how the organi-zation of the accountancy profession in the UKcould be seen as affected by broader political pro-cesses. He concluded:

Anything more than cosmetic changes in theorganization of the profession and its stew-ardship of the public interest are likely tooccur only when the interests of inuentialindividuals or organized sections of themembership are frustrated, when the statethreatens to withdraw the privilege of self-regulation and/or when self-interested pro-crastination over the deep-seated politicaland organizational problems of the profes-sion weakens the professions standing andcredibility, thereby stimulating public aware-ness and concern over its privileged role assteward of the public interest ( Willmott,1986, pp. 576577).

Loft (1986) had used a genealogical approach toanalyze the signicance of the formation of one of

these UK professional bodies (the Institute of Costand Works Accountants), which she saw as part of an attempt on the part of an occupational group-ing to establish knowledge claims to the techniquesof cost accounting.

Willmott worked with Cooper, Puxty, Loweand later Robson on an extensive comparativeproject that examined from both a historical anda contemporary perspective the relationshipsbetween professional accountancy and the state.Important elements of this project ( Puxty, Will-

21 This debate is summarized in Fleischman, Kalbers, andParker (1996) which gives extensive references to the contribu-tions from different sides, including such important papers asEdwards (1989) and Fleischman and Tyson (1993) .



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mott, Cooper, & Lowe, 1987; Cooper, Puxty,Lowe, & Willmott, 1989; Robson, Willmott, Coo-per, & Puxty, 1994 ) showed how the very meaning

of the term profession shifted through time, andcould be exploited to facilitate re-negotiation andpromote (and occasionally constrain) occupationalchange. The complex nature of the accountancyprofession in the UK, with several competingbodies forming a shifting network of alliancesand oppositions, has also been studied by Walker.In a series of papers ( Shackleton & Walker, 1998;Walker, 1991, 1995, 2004; Walker & Shackleton,1995, 1998), the contexts in which professionalbodies interface with each other and with the stateare analyzed through a detailed reading of publicrecords, professional archives and secondarysources.

Similar material forms the basis of the studiesof the accountancy profession in Australia. Twobroad groups of studies have complemented eachother in giving a rounded view of the issues andpersonalities involved in the professionalizationproject. A critical stance, informed by copiousarchival material, in provided by Chua and Poul-laos. In their research ( Chua & Poullaos, 1993,1998; Poullaos, 1993, 1994), links are demon-

strated between the difficulties that a new profes-sional organization had in obtaining closure(preventing non-members from practising asaccountants) and the nature of markets for ser-vices, with the attitudes of a young country tostructures that appeared redolent of the imperialcentre playing an important part in the directionthat the professionalization project took. Otherstudies have been prepared to use innovativeapproaches such as prosopography (the collectivebiography of a dened group of individuals) to

gain a clearer view of the backgrounds of the peo-ple involved in early Australian professionaliza-tion projects, with Edwards, Carnegie, andCauberg (1997) and Carnegie and Edwards(2001) studying the founders of the IncorporatedInstitute of Accountants of Victoria. This followsup the study by Carnegie (1993) of the emergenceand decline of a rival organization, explaining thelatter in terms of the difficulties faced by a rurally-based body in a period of increasing urbani-zation.

In addition to studies of professional bodies,increasingly examinations are appearing of thework of accountants, and the problems and con-

straints that they face. The issue of professionalethics has been investigated by Preston, Cooper,Scarbrough, and Chilton (1995) , who show howchanges in the code of professional ethics of theUS accountancy profession are translations of both the political challenges to the legitimacy of accountants and a wider transformation in theculture of American society (p. 507). Sikkaand Willmott (1995) write a history of the pres-ent by examining how the notion of professionalindependence was mobilized by the UK account-ing profession from the 1970s to protect self-reg-ulation from perceived threats from the state. Thedetailed content of auditing has become a topicof interest, with Power (1992) showing howapparently technical issues relating to audit sam-pling reected deeper concerns relating to thechange in the capabilities and promise of audit,with an appeal to science and rationality act-ing as a mechanism by which auditors could copewith their inability to audit in depth large modernorganizations. The theme of statistical samplingin audit has been addressed from an institutional

theory perspective by Carpenter and Dirsmith(1993). More recently, Gietzmann and Quick(1998) and Napier (1998) have provided the basisof a comparison through time and across space of the changing role of auditor liability. Theirpapers contrast how capped liability in Germanyhas helped to preserve the status of auditors asmembers of a free profession, while unlimitedliability in the UK has shifted from being thebadge of the auditor as professional to a con-straint on the auditor as commercial business

advisor.Important studies that recognize the diversity of the practice of accountancy and the social and eco-nomic roles of accountants continue to appear.Outstanding among these is the book-length inves-tigation into accountants in British managementThe Priesthood of Industry (Matthews, Anderson,& Edwards, 1998; see review by Walker, 2000 ).This addresses a question raised not only byaccounting researchers such as Armstrong (1987)and Hopper and Armstrong (1991) , but also



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within the economic and business history litera-ture: is the presence in signicant numbers of pro-fessionally-qualied accountants (who are usually

trained within public practice) in senior manage-ment positions in British industry and commercean important expl

Accounts of Change-30 Years of Historical Accounting Research

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