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Accounting history and theorising about organisations

Garry D. Carnegie, Karen M. Mcbride, Christopher J. Napier, Lee D. Parker

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bar.2020.100932 Reference: YBARE
100932

To appear in: The British Accounting Review

Received Date: 21 December 2019

Revised Date: 25 May 2020
Accepted Date: 9 June 2020

Please cite this article as: Carnegie, G.D., Mcbride, K.M., Napier, C.J., Parker, L.D., Accounting history and
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 ACCOUNTING HISTORY AND THEORISING
ABOUT ORGANISATIONS

GARRY D. CARNEGIE
RMIT University

KAREN M. MCBRIDE*
University of Portsmouth

CHRISTOPHER J. NAPIER
Royal Holloway University of London

LEE D. PARKER
RMIT University

* Corresponding author:
School of Business and Law
University of Portsmouth
Richmond Building
Portland Street
Portsmouth PO1 3DE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 023 92 844282

E-mail: [email protected]
Please do not cite or reproduce this paper without the permission of the corresponding author.

ACCOUNTING HISTORY AND THEORISING

ABOUT ORGANISATIONS

ABSTRACT

Historical accounting research has a substantial track record of using a variety of theoretical

insights to better understand of 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, both impacting human behaviour and

organisational and social functioning and development. As social practice, accounting

emerges deeply embedded and pervasive in organisations and societies.

Key words: Accounting, organisations, interdisciplinary and critical research, accounting

[1]
history, organisation history, theory, social practice.
ACCOUNTING HISTORY AND THEORISING
ABOUT ORGANISATIONS

1. INTRODUCTION
Historical accounting research has had an upward trajectory in terms of theorising

accounting’s past within the past 35 years or so (Bisman, 2012; Carnegie & Napier, 2017a;

Fleischman & Radcliffe, 2005; Fowler & Keeper, 2016; Gomes, Carnegie, Napier, Parker, &

West, 2011; Parker, 2015; Richardson, 2008 ), and has carved out a significant place in the

academic discipline of accounting during that period. Accounting history research is broad

and diverse in the subjects it addresses, the methods it uses, the theories chosen to inform it,

and the periods and places it studies. Indeed, accounting history researchers now embrace and

draw upon a range of disciplines from across economics, political science, gender studies,

sociology, art and literature, architecture, theology and more (Carnegie & Napier, 2017a;

Jones & Oldroyd, 2015; Napier, 2009; Walker, 2005). A factor contributing to this

development to at least the mid-1990s, has been “the increasing number of accounting

researchers trained in different traditions, such as sociology, philosophy and even history”

(Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p. 15).

The central organising principle of this study is that the subject matter of accounting

historians is “social”,1 in that accounting practices and controls are situated within specific

organisational and social contexts. Rather than being a merely technical practice, accounting

emergence and change is a social practice that impacts on human behaviour within

organisations in local, time-specific contexts. It impacts organisational practices and

individual behaviours and social relationships.2 Thereby, the study of accounting’s past is also
1 Historical research of any genre, however, sets the examination of surviving primary sources, aided by
relevant secondary materials, within the social, economic, and political contexts of past timeframes during
which phenomenon under investigation took place.
2 Accounting can also be understood as a moral practice, as addressed, for example, by Tsahuridu & Carnegie
(2018, third paragraph), which offers potential for the development of the discipline in positive ways.
[2]
an investigation of society’s past. Accounting is deeply embedded in organisations and

societies and is inherently enabling, disabling and pervasive. Historical knowledge of

accounting in the organisational and social contexts in which it operated, permits fuller

understanding not just of accounting’s past but also of society’s past while also permitting a

fuller appreciation not only of accounting today, but also of society’s present.

Is it possible to study organisations without studying society historically? The authors

do not believe this is feasible once accounting is recognised as both technical practice and

social practice. In examining and evaluating the consequences of accounting for human

behaviour, it is arguably productive to apply theories drawn from other disciplines that

attempt to explain the impacts of accounting, as social practice, on human behaviour in

specific contexts (e.g., Carnegie, 2019; Sidhu, Carnegie, & West, 2020).

According to Napier (2009, p. 44), the use of theories drawn from other disciplines to

explore and explain accounting’s past, “has acted as an important counterbalance to a

research discipline that has often been dominated by econometrics and behavioural

psychology”. Interdisciplinary and critical research in accounting history has built a strong

literature and offers key learnings for scholars both within and beyond the accounting

discipline. The study’s objective is centred around a “social turn” 3 in accounting historians’

contributions over the past four decades to the contemporary interdisciplinary and critical

accounting literature on organisations and organisational processes. The specific aims are

three-fold: 1) explain the significant leadership of accounting history researchers in

contributing to a social turn in interdisciplinary and critical accounting research, 2) identify

the key factors influencing this social turn, and 3) outline what history and contemporary

3 The study addresses how a social turn occurred in the accounting literature with an increasing number and
diversity of scholars conceiving accounting as social practice, with implications for human behaviour, hereby
placing greater attention on the consequences of accounting in organisations and society, both in the past and the
present day.

[3]
scholars of accounting and organisations can learn from this diversity of accounting history

research.

This study offers a contribution to our collective knowledge of accounting history's

historiography. It also addresses scholars of accounting and organisational history and

contemporary accounting and organisational scholars who currently may not appreciate

accounting history's achievements and contribution to the interdisciplinary and critical study

of organisations and their processes. It also addresses historians who have yet to adopt

interdisciplinary and critical approaches to exploring accounting’s past. Further it encourages

cross-fertilisation theoretical adoption of theories, and greater theoretical innovation, across

accounting and organisational research fields.

The study elucidates why accounting history has been “successful” in adopting

theorisation to understand and portray accounting as a phenomenon that shapes human

behaviour and helps to facilitate new priorities and cultures within organisations and

societies. Accepting the conception of accounting as social practice allows contemporary and

historical organisational scholars to theorise organisations within their specialisms. In this

way, the study may contribute to the breaking-down of silos across discipline groups within

academia.

The study’s central objective, as outlined, explores the social turn in historical

accounting research. In order to meet the study’s aims, several key research questions are

posed. First, what contributed to the emergence of theorisation in accounting history from its

predecessor literature of the 1960s and 1970s? Second, what led to the advent and

development of the so-called “new accounting history” that embraced a wide range of social

theories to study accounting within organisations and in society? Third, what organisational

[4]
themes have accounting historians investigated? Fourth and finally, how did they draw on

social theories to inform their research and their findings?

These questions are important if we are to recognise that various approaches to

accounting history studies are now informed and reinforced by the recognition that historical

case studies, contemporary organisational case studies, can benefit from a deeper

engagement with theory. Rather than regarding case studies as illustrations of theory in

action, a theory can explain historical evidence and is an important aspect of accounting

historians’ theoretically engaging with the evidence. This may avoid illusory conclusions as

Tyson (2000), for instance, warns against. It facilitates logically consistent theoretical

explanations of the phenomenal forms of accounting that are confirmed or refuted by

empirical observations.

Bryer (2011) suggests that new accounting history studies are representative of a new

approach that can be classed as science (Kuhn, 1970). This comes about from a basic

reworking of the idea of accounting, which draws on the theories of the social (Bryer, 1998).

By engaging with and explaining theory for analysis purposes, researchers can contribute to

theory development and may thoughtfully combine theories in suitable and innovative ways

for deeper or broader analytical purposes. In this way theoretical insights can potentially

deepen our understanding of accounting practice and its interface with organisational

processes (Humphrey & Scapens, 1996).

Accounting researchers have seized the option of a broader conception of what counts

as theorisation, as laid out by Llewellyn (2003) in her seminal exposition of the five levels of

organisational theorising. Her levels of theorising range from the micro-level use of

metaphor, to differentiation, conceptualisation, context-bound theorising of settings, and

finally to context-free “grand” theorising. Examples of all of these levels of theorising in

published historical accounting research can be observed in sections 5 to 7 which follow, and

[5]
an outline of studies at her different levels of theorising, as interpreted by the authors, appears

in Appendix 1.4 According to Llewellyn (2003, p. 662), “theorization (or conceptual framing)

is the ‘value-added’ of qualitative accounting research”. Warning against the adoption of

natural science views of what theory is or should be, Llewellyn (2003, p. 664) notes that

highly abstract and general theories tend to draw attention away from “emergent, localized

phenomena” and from studying phenomena in context.

This study will provide an overview of the emergence of the accounting history

literature from more traditional approaches and concerns in the 1960s and 1970s, to more

contemporary theoretical orientations emphasising the “social”, and identify the main

determinants of this prime historiographical trend in accounting. The next section introduces

the spectrum of theories that more recent historical accounting research studies exhibit. The

article proceeds to articulate interdisciplinary and critical accounting researchers’ recognition

of accounting as social practice – an important realisation in informing accounting historians’

approaches to their research. Three themes have emerged from more recent accounting

history research. Each are addressed in turn: 1) accounting’s multiple organisational roles, 2)

its part in the exercise of organisational power and control, and 3) its contribution to

organisational change. These themes are then examined with reference to certain historians’

theorisations of their research. Concluding comments complete the study.

2. EMERGENCE OF THEORY IN ACCOUNTING HISTORY

Until the 1970s, most accounting history writing could be characterised as

predominantly descriptive narrative (Napier, 2009), with no explicit or even implicit

4 It is acknowledged that other accounting history researchers may not classify certain theories in the same way
as has occurred in this study. However, interpretation is common in historical accounting research and it is
difficult to derive a classification framework for theories which would be agreed upon on and applied by all
researchers in a universal way. Furthermore, some studies may reflect the use of theories that are classified at
two or more levels of theorising.

[6]
theorisation.5 Carnegie & Napier (2017a, p. 73) pointed out that early accounting history

research “tended to focus on accounting treatises, accounting practices and accountants

themselves … [and] most research examined business and business people”. Despite some

rigorous examinations of aspects of accounting, such as the general history provided by

Littleton (1933) and the more specific examination of the development of cost accounting by

Garner (1954), early historians of accounting were often antiquarians and bibliophiles

(Napier, 2009). Some researchers drew on economic reasoning to assess the extent to which

accounting, and in particular double-entry bookkeeping, made an important contribution to

the emergence and development of capitalism. Yamey (1949, 1964) used evidence from early

accounting treatises and ledgers, and theoretical arguments about the relevance of accounting

information to economic decision making, to suggest that capitalism had emerged without the

assistance of double-entry bookkeeping. Economic and business historians, Pollard (1965)

shared this poor opinion of the significance of accounting as a factor in business success

during the industrial revolution.

However, the emergence of the “new business history” associated with Chandler

(1962) began to draw the attention of scholars towards the ways in which bookkeeping and

costing systems enabled new methods of business organisation in the nineteenth century.

Firms studied by Chandler, such as du Pont and General Motors, were among those examined

by Johnson (1972, 1975a, 1975b, 1981, 1983), using a “transaction cost economics”

framework drawn from the work of Coase (1937) and Williamson (1973). Accounting

systems were determined to be necessary to coordinate transactions within firms, and

accounting developments, such as standard costing and the use of rate of return to assess

managers’ performance, facilitated the expansion of large enterprises and the emergence of

5 Early contributors were prone to pronounce that accounting “had deep roots and a long-standing ethic”
(Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p. 10) with Woolf (1912, p. vii) taking a broad perspective in stating: “The history of
accountancy is, in a large measure, the history of civilisation”.
[7]
multi-divisional structures. Although transaction cost economics presented a narrative of

innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by the 1920s, new accounting

methods were apparently less likely to emerge: “Virtually all of the practices employed by

firms today and explicated in leading cost accounting textbooks had been developed by 1925”

(Kaplan, 1983, p. 390). This lack of accounting innovation was highlighted by Johnson

& Kaplan (1987), who argued in Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management

Accounting, that the decline of manufacturing in the United States of America (USA) after the

WWII was the consequence of inappropriate costing methods.

During the late 1960s, accounting research in general took an empirical turn, with an

increasing use of econometric analysis of large data sets of accounting numbers and security

price research supplanting previously identified mainstream research aimed at improving

accounting practice (e.g., Ball & Brown, 1968; Beaver, 1981). This empirical turn stimulated

some sites of resistance, one of which was accounting history. The accounting empiricists’

conception of research drew heavily on scientistic models. Within this quantitative tradition,

historical accounting research, much of which focused on documenting technical practices

within individual organisations and presenting its findings as narratives rather than statistics,

was often not regarded as “research” at all (Parker, 1999, pp. 14-15). Furthermore, at least

some investigations of the genre may have been determined as antiquarian in largely

reflecting a fascination for early accounting records and texts (Mattessich, 2003; also see

Carnegie & Napier, 2012).

The early 1970s saw various attempts to institutionalise historical accounting research,

including the formation of the USA-based Academy of Accounting Historians in 1974. This

organisation encouraged accounting history researchers to become more aware of

“mainstream” methodological and theoretical directions within history, so that historical

[8]
studies would reflect a greater appreciation of issues such as historical causation and the roles

of narrative (Parker & Graves, 1989). Previts, Parker, & Coffman (1990a, p. 1) distinguished

between “history as a social science, with an emphasis on interpretation, criticism and

method, and history as a descriptive narrative form.” The same authors proposed various

themes for accounting history, including biography, history of institutions and development

of accounting thought, and also advocated a wide range of methods, including both casestudy

and large sample statistical approaches to historical accounting data. One of their themes was

“critical history”, where practitioners of the genre “view accountancy development through

different theoretical perspectives” but, nonetheless, “emphasize the relationship between

accounting and its organizational, social and political context” (Previts, Parker, & Coffman,

1990b, p. 143). Around this time, Napier (1989), examined three interrelated approaches to

historical accounting research, one being “the locating of accounting in its sociohistorical

context” (Napier, 1989, p. 237), building on earlier works by Hopwood and others,

emphasising the role for such perspectives specifically in accounting history.

The social turn in historical accounting research, took place mainly in the United

Kingdom (UK) under the sponsorship of Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS),

which was first published in 1976, closely followed by Australian support exhibited largely

through the British-published and Australian-edited Accounting, Auditing & Accountability

Journal (AAAJ) which appeared in 1988,6 and the North American-based expatriate British

edited Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) published from 19907. This progressive

development of the literature was an outcome of a general growth in interdisciplinary and

critical accounting studies from the mid-1970s. The Founding Joint Editors of AAAJ, Lee

Parker and James Guthrie, in their first editorial, stated their intention for the journal “ … to

deepen our understanding of the development, current and potential state of the [accounting]
6 The joint Founding Editors of AAAJ, Lee Parker and James Guthrie, continue to jointly edit the journal in its
33rd year of publication at the time of writing (Carnegie & Napier, 2017b; Guthrie & Parker, 2017).
7 These three journals are broadly positioned within the sociological, critical, and interpretive tradition.
[9]
discipline, both as a product of its environment and of a powerful influence which shapes its

environment as well” (Guthrie & Parker, 1998, p. 3; also see Carnegie & Napier, 2017b).

Theories are suited to examine these broad-scope conceptions of accounting, particularly how

accounting impacts human behaviour in organisations and society. Such directions were

seeded by Parker, prior to the publication of his jointly authored articles in Abacus two years

later (i.e. Previts, Parker & Coffman, 1990a, 1990b). Parker was also in a favourable position

to influence as the Academy of Accounting Historians first appointed non-USA citizen as

President of the organisation in 1990-1991.

Broadbent & Laughlin (2013, p. 21) identified two individuals as “key in the initial

development of the ICPA [Interdisciplinary and Critical Perspectives on Accounting]

Project”: Anthony Hopwood and Tony Lowe. The “new accounting history” genre of

research can reasonably be argued to come from the intellectual and institutional doors

opened by Hopwood with Lowe, being more specifically, a pioneering advocate and

researcher of critical accounting. According to Haslam & Sikka (2016, p. xix), Lowe

“transformed our thinking about accounting by locating it in broader social and political

contexts”.

Hopwood established the journal AOS as an outlet for research informed by a wide

range of theoretical approaches, including those grounded in sociology and political theory.

He stated in his opening editorial that “accounting has played a vital role in the development

of modern society” (Hopwood, 1976, p. 1), emphasising the importance of historical

accounting research. Hopwood (1983, p. 287) firmly advocated the study of “accounting in

the contexts in which it operates” 8 which serves to avoid “detaching accounting from its

organisational setting” (1983: 288). He encouraged historical articles in AOS, first from

8 These words were contained in the title of this 1983 AOS article and became a form of catchcry of accounting
researchers who were following Hopwood’s academic leadership.
[10]
scholars associated with the “new business history” (Chandler & Daems, 1979; Johnson,

1983), then from researchers who applied “political economy” approaches to understand

accounting’s broader roles in society (Tinker, 1980; Tinker, Merino, & Neimark, 1982).

These scholars’ reflections and critiques concerning accounting history also appeared in early

issues of AAAJ and CPA (Neimark, 1990; Tinker & Neimark, 1988). In the early years of

AOS, several innovative contributions drew on the ideas of the French social theorist Michel

Foucault (Burchell, Clubb, & Hopwood, 1985; Hoskin & Macve, 1986; Loft, 1986; Miller,

1986).

Having rapidly joined the AOS interdisciplinary and critical theory-informed

accounting history publishing agenda, AAAJ’s and CPA’s earliest publications included

articles by Tinker & Neimark (1988), Funnell (1990), Neimark (1990), Stewart (1992), Bryer

(1993) and Tyson (1993). AAAJ’s and CPA’s leadership evidenced in publishing the work of

accounting historians engaging with critical accounting theory and literature has been

recognised by Jones & Oldroyd (2015). Hopwood’s significant contributions to accounting

research of the genre are acknowledged by several researchers, including Bradshaw (2010),

Carmona & Lukka (2010), Guthrie & Parker (2010) and Miller (2010).

Lowe developed a group of researchers for whom history was an acceptable approach

for understanding and critiquing modern accounting ideas and practices. His research

approach “enabled us to see accounting as a moral, social and practical technology that

affects a wide variety of stakeholders” (Haslam & Sikka, 2016, p. xix; also see Cooper, 2014;

Laughlin, 2014;9 Wilson & Sikka, 2014).

9 This tribute appears in Haslam & Sikka (2016, pp. 1-18).

[11]
 An early advocate of the need for an “intellectual emancipation” of accounting (Lowe

& Tinker, 1977), Lowe built a network of academics at the University of Sheffield, who

shared his view that existing accounting practices and the economic theories that underpinned

them needed to be critiqued. Lowe did not advocate any particular theoretical framework,

however his students and colleagues advanced a wide range of views, such as Tinker’s

Marxist approach, more generic political economy (e.g., Cooper & Sherer, 1984), labour

process theory (e.g., Armstrong, 1985), and Habermasian theory (e.g., Laughlin, 1987).

Another important stream of historical research drew on critical aspects of the sociology of

the professions to challenge conventional narratives of the accountancy profession as a

benign force serving the public interest under the principle of altruism (e.g., Willmott, 1986).

Around this time, academics with broad research backgrounds, including scholars drawn from

the social sciences were being attracted to the emerging ICPA research.

Academics at the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester promoted the triennial series of

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting (IPA) conferences (Roslender & Dillard, 2003),

beginning in 1985.10 These conferences attracted researchers from within and beyond

accounting departments, and provided diverse theoretical perspectives for studying

accounting practice in both the present and the past. The second conference, in 1988, included

several historical accounting works, some of which would be published in a special issue of

AOS entitled “The New Accounting History”. The issue was introduced by the conference

organisers Peter Miller, Trevor Hopper and Richard Laughlin, who promoted new accounting

history as an eclectic field both theoretically and methodologically (Miller, Hopper, &

Laughlin, 1991). The issue reflected, inter alia, work grounded in Marx (e.g.,

10 Ten years later in 1995, AAAJ launched its Asia Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting (APIRA)
conference in three-year rotation with the IPA conference and Critical Perspectives on Accounting journal’s
Critical Perspectives on Accounting conference. All three conferences support interdisciplinary and critical
accounting research including historical accounting research.
[12]
Bryer, 1991; 2019), Latour (Robson, 1991), labour process theory (Hopper & Armstrong,

1991), and German critical theory (Gallhofer & Haslam, 1991). The influence of Foucault

was evident in the later article “Genealogies of calculation” (Miller & Napier, 1993), which

was seen by more traditional accounting historians (e.g., Fleischman & Tyson, 1997) as

denigrating archive-based research that did not adopt an explicit theoretical position.

The role of theory, and of certain theorists, in historical accounting research

subsequently stimulated an extensive and still not settled debate (e.g., Carnegie, 2014a). New

accounting history has been accused of “ethnocentrism” by Zan (2016, p. 582), who perceives

an excessive focus on the UK, which does not acknowledge recent expectations and related

trends for scholars, especially in European countries, to publish their research in leading

international refereed journals (e.g., Carnegie, 2017; Gomes, Giovannoni, GutiérrezHidalgo

& Zimnovitch, 2015; Jones & Oldroyd, 2015). Accounting historians have been leading

scholars in the field to engage in interdisciplinary and critical research, and to collaborate

with researchers from other disciplines, both business and non-business (e.g., Baskerville,

Carrera, Gomes, Lai & Parker, 2017; Carnegie, 2014b, 2020; Gomes et al., 2011; Guthrie &

Parker, 2006; Matthews, 2019; Walker, 2008).

A wide range of theories and approaches have been used by historical accounting

researchers in recent decades. In practice, many studies adopt eclectic theorisations, such as

Miller (1991) who combined ideas from Foucault and Latour to develop an analytical model

to explain how governments first problematise issues, and then proceed to develop programs

to intervene in the problem areas, themselves acting at a distance on economy and society. An

analysis of historical research articles appearing in the first 30 years of AOS (Napier, 2006),

identified the underlying theory or theories employed by authors of historical studies, such as

gender (Lehman, 1992), institutional theory (Carpenter & Dirsmith, 1993), and legal theory

(Mills, 1993). These diverse theories appear in Lehman’s study of the barriers faced by

[13]
women seeking entry to the accountancy profession, through Carpenter & Dirsmith’s

examination of the adoption of statistical sampling techniques by auditors, and Mills’ review

of how previous researchers had interpreted USA and UK legal cases on accounting and

auditing.

Such interdisciplinary historical research is now well supported by such journals as

AOS, AAAJ and CPA. Moreover, several specialist accounting history journals, published

only in the English-language, specifically Accounting Historians Journal, Accounting

History, and Accounting History Review (known as Accounting, Business & Financial

History until 2010), international conferences and colloquia have provided a focus for new

generations of ICPA researchers.11 Various general accounting journals have also been

publishing historical accounting research for many years, including Abacus, Accounting and

Business Research and British Accounting Review with the latter two increasingly reflecting

interdisciplinary accounting research. Historical accounting research is diverse, and it is

impossible to cover all its main strands in the present study. For instance, aspects such as

professionalisation, a significant theme in historical accounting research (see West, 1996,

1998, 2003; Sidhu, Carnegie, & West, 2020), will not be considered further.12 There remains,

however, considerable opportunities for further historical research and theoretical innovation

on the professionalisation of accounting. We now concentrate on theoretically informed

historical work in management accounting and control, to provide a framework for discussing

the contribution of this work to historically informed organisational studies.

11 In the first issue of the New Series (NS) of Accounting History published in 1996, the editor specifically
encouraged “the explicit use of theoretical perspectives drawn from relevant disciplines such as economics,
sociology and political theory in conducting investigative, explanatory studies of accounting’s past” (Carnegie,
1996, p. 5). At the time of writing, Accounting History is a leading proponent and publisher of ICPA research. 12
A special double issue of Accounting History on the theme, “The emergence of accounting as a global
profession”, which illustrate the diverse theoretical approaches adopted in accounting professionalisation
studies, and was guest edited by Miranti (2014).
[14]
 3. A SPECTRUM OF THEORIES
Investigating and theorising about the ways in which organisations sustain themselves

has been a major preoccupation of management accounting historians predominately, who

seek a situationally grounded understanding of the interface between management and

accounting practices in the operational and financial management of organisations: their

strategies, routine processes, outputs, and impacts on stakeholders. For example, cost and

management accounting historians, examine such sectors as transport, manufacturing, mining,

commerce, and agriculture (Carnegie & Napier, 1996; Walker, 2008). They invariably apply a

variety of theoretical perspectives to the examination and interpretation of evidence drawn

from archival sources and oral evidence (Carnegie & Napier, 1996, 2012).

Theoretical approaches have drawn upon neoclassical economic theory and the

theories of Michel Foucault, Karl Marx and labour process (Gomes, 2008; Kearins & Hooper,

2002; Parker, 1997, 1999; Richardson, 2008; Stewart, 1992), the French social theorists

beyond Foucault such as: Aglietta, Althusser, Bachelard, Badiou, Barthes, Baudrillard, and

Bourdieu12 (Chiapello & Baker, 2011), Giddens and structuration theory, Latour and

actornetwork theory, and new institutional theory (Gomes, 2008). Multiple theoretically

informed historical investigations of organisational strategy and process has produced

multiparadigmatic interpretations reflecting a range of social, economic, institutional and

political theories. Of late, these multiple perspectives have been increasingly accepted as co-

existing and in enriching our pluralistic understandings of organisational strategy and process

(Bisman, 2012; Carnegie & Napier, 1996, 2012; Fleischman, Kalbers, & Parker, 1996;

Walker, 2008).

It may not always be clear why such theoretical richness or diversity makes a positive

contribution to our stock of contemporary and historical knowledge. Carnegie & Napier

12 Using the first two letters of the alphabet.

[15]
(2017a, p. 74) identified that the ICPA project has impinged on historical accounting research

in two major ways:

First, such research is seen as inherently interdisciplinary in that it views accounting

through a disciplinary lens that is not economic in nature: Roslender and Dillard

(2003: 328) described the contributions of some earlier accounting historians as

‘precontemporary’ interdisciplinary accounting research. Second, many of the

theoretical frameworks adopted by interdisciplinary and critical accounting

researchers have been used (in several cases pioneered) in historical accounting

research13.

Importantly, ICPA research in accounting history helped to uncover accounting as an

instrument of power and control. This has moved the perspective on accounting considerably

beyond its earlier, more traditional conception as a purely technical practice. Instead,

conceiving accounting as social practice enables research questions to be addressed that do

not arise in economics, where power is not acknowledged as being influential, and where

control is seen as the prerogative of the market.

The broad benefits of applying theories for understanding and critiquing accounting

emerges in three respects. First, the collective theories in use illuminate accounting in

different contexts where in operates, thereby revealing accounting as an instrument of power

and control in organisations and society. Second, the existence and use of different theories

mirrors the world which comprises a myriad of world views on the way humans around the

globe behave. Third, the competitive advantage of the social turn in accounting, has provided

13 Examples given by Carnegie & Napier (2017a) of such pioneering contribution in historical accounting
research include Tinker (1980) by means of the application of political economy in accounting, Burchell et al.
(1985) using Foucault’s ideas, and Hoskin & Macve (1986) in exploring connections between modes of writing
and examination and the application of double entry bookkeeping.

[16]
the means for researchers in the discipline to pose and answer questions that extend beyond

the limits of economics, opening up our thinking and questioning beyond a mere quantitative

way of viewing and understanding the world.

According to Carnegie (2014b, p. 1242) “historical accounting researchers have

accepted a broad connection of what constitutes theorisation in historical accounting

research”. The theorisation of accounting research has contributed to the study of

accounting’s past in “everyday settings involving various social, religious and other not-

forprofit institutions” (Carnegie &Napier, 2012, p. 336; also see Hopwood, 1994, Jeacle,

2009, 2012). Accounting researchers are not known for developing and extending their own

theories in conducting interdisciplinary and critical accounting research. They generally select

and use theories to inform their research findings that have been established and welltested in

an array of other disciplines, often in non-business disciplines.

Management accounting history studies addressing the role of accounting in driving

and reflecting organisational strategy and process have, for example, included examinations

of organisations in a diversity of settings, such as commerce (Irvine & Deo, 2006), charities

(Miley & Read, 2016), social welfare (Oakes & Young, 2008), agriculture (Carnegie, 1993,

1997; Irvine, 2012; Tyson, Fleischman, & Oldroyd, 2004), transport (Arnold & McCartney,

2008), fashion (Sargiacomo, 2008), and manufacturing (Ding & McKinstry, 2013;

Fleischman & Parker, 1990; Fleischman & Tyson, 1996; Lloyd-Jones, Maltby, Lewis, &

Matthews, 2006; Smith & Boyns, 2005; Takeda & Boyns, 2014) and the military (Funnell &

Williams, 2014; McBride, 2019, 2020; McBride, Hines & Craig, 2016). 14 Their research

14 Further relevant contributions are identified in Cobbin & Burrows (2018) who reviewed 55 articles published
during on the period (2000-2017) on the topic “Accounting, the military and war”
[17]
designs, interpretations and further theorising have drawn upon neoclassical economic and

management theory (Fleischman & Parker, 1990; Smith & Boyns, 2005; Takeda & Boyns,

2014), contingency theory (Ding & McKinstry, 2013), cultural perspectives (Carnegie, 1993,

1997; Takeda & Boyns, 2014), institutional sociology (Sargiacomo, 2008), Weber (Funnell &

Williams, 2014), Hirschman’s theory of exit, voice and loyalty (Lloyd-Jones et al., 2006),

stigmatisation (Miley & Read, 2016), and rhetoric (Irvine, 2012).

Accounting history research has also exhibited the application of multiple theories to

the one study, for example Foucault, Marx and neoclassicism applied by Tyson et al. (2004),

Weber and Marx drawn upon by Arnold & McCartney (2008), pragmatist and feminist

theories engaged in a study by Oakes & Young (2008), economic rationalism, Foucault and

labour process brought to bear upon their subject by Fleischman & Tyson (1996), and the five

levels of theorising of Llewellyn (2003) informing Irvine & Deo’s (2006) historical analysis.

This has led to a richness and diversity of behaviours, motivations, concepts, and

relationships within observed strategies and processes, and to the development of historical

field-based theorisations that speak to multiple audiences and agendas concerned with both

past and present organisational functioning and development.

We now move to elucidate some of the themes that have been developed through

these theorised approaches to accounting history research. These are exemplified through

selections of studies that have emerged in thematic areas and that contribute not only to the

historical literature of the discipline, but to concerns that engage contemporary accounting

researchers as well as provides avenues for cross-fertilisation with organisational scholars,

including organisational historians.

4. ORGANISATIONAL ACCOUNTING AS SOCIAL PRACTICE

[18]
 The word “accounting” implies an activity or process. Czarniawska (2008) has

encouraged organisation researchers to study “organising” as a process rather than

“organisations” as objects. Her main aim, according to Hamilton (2011, p. 719), “is to trouble

an idealistic view of organizations as simple structures; places where management is done

and change happens”. Without an appreciation of accounting (and marketing, which

Czarniawska ranks alongside accounting as a “logic of representation”), “is it impossible to

understand today’s management” (Czarniawska, 2008, p. 31). Accounting historians who

recognise accounting as social practice contend that it is impossible to understand

management, however described, within historical contexts without an understanding of the

nature, roles, uses and impacts of accounting. Thus, rather than projecting accounting “as a

phenomenon divorced from the social” (Hopwood, 1983, p. 290; also see Hopwood, 1994;

Hopwood & Miller, 1994) it is influential not only within contemporary but also within

historical organisational contexts. Historical studies of accounting can allow accounting to

emerge as a key facilitator of, and often a central manifestation of, organisational action and

change.

Hopwood (1990, p. 8) emphasised three key roles for accounting “in processes of

organizational change”. First, accounting serves to create visibility in the organisation,

described as “making things visible that otherwise would not be” (1990, p. 8). Second,

accounting serves to objectify phenomena, specifically “of making appear real and seemingly

precise those things that would otherwise reside in the realm of the abstract” (1990, p. 9).

Third, accounting helps to create a domain of economic action. Hence, “the abstractions and

objectifications in the accounting area are created in the name of the economic” (1990, p. 9).

Accounting, therefore, does not merely reflect organisational circumstances, but is also “a

phenomenon that can play a role in changing them” (1990, p. 12). From a strategic

perspective, “accounting can help to make organizations what they were not” (1990, p. 12).

[19]
Similarly, organisations become what accounting shapes them to be which, in turn,

contributes to defining and reflecting society.

Accounting exists where human behaviour is to be monitored, controlled or modified

and is now typically perceived by accounting historians “as an instrument of power and

domination rather than as a value-free body of ideas and techniques for putting into effect and

monitoring contracts freely entered into between equals” (Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p. 8). It

is now well recognised by the interdisciplinary and critical accounting research community

that accounting is adopted in organisations not for its technical purity nor for its lack of

contention, but because accounting, as social practice, conditions and shapes the behaviour of

individuals and, in the process, produces intended (as well as unintended) impacts on

organisational and social functioning and development. This is a theme that has been avidly

taken up by accounting historians whose literature in this area has proliferated and which

offers the contemporary accounting research community, a rich source of foundational and

informing literature. In addition, it is noteworthy that historical accounting researchers have

not limited their attention to companies or businesses and the people who run them, as was

the tradition, but have embraced a more inclusive conception of “the organisation”. Within

the past 20 years, historical accounting studies have been extended into a diversity of

organisational and social settings, including the family home, the place of worship, the

school, the university, the military, the charity, the asylum, the circus, and in sporting clubs.

Accounting’s past in organisations has also been studied in the context of totalitarian regimes

(e.g. Detzen and Hoffmann, 2020 in a German university).

5. MULTIPLE ORGANISATIONAL ROLES

Not only have accounting historians extended their gaze to a wide range of

organisational types but they have explored the wide variety of roles played by accounting in

the maintenance, process development and strategies pursued by organisations historically.

[20]
This is best explained with reference to a small sample of case studies that reveal the

spectrum involved.

Organisational roles have included, the possibility that internal contracting was

discontinued in favour of a more sophisticated cost accounting system that was thought to

offer improved hierarchical surveillance and labour calculability, thereby delivering enhanced

co-ordination and control and further reducing costs (Fleischman & Tyson, 1996). These

authors examined the process of inside contracting in several major USA manufacturing

companies in the context of nineteenth century mass production industries, focusing on the

Waltham Watch Company (WWC). They applied economic rationalist and labour process

perspectives to this historical study, to better understand the reasons behind the practice and

later abandonment of inside contracting and its replacement by more detailed cost accounting

information systems. Economic rationalists claim that the choice of methods was grounded in

the need to co-ordinate complex manufacturing processes and to meet competitive pressures.

Labour process theorists argue that various political, social, and ideological factors led to the

demise of inside contracting. The authors expressed a belief that Foucauldian theory would

suggest that internal contracting may have been discontinued in favour of a more

sophisticated cost accounting system that was thought to offer improved hierarchical

surveillance and labour calculability, delivering enhanced co-ordination and control and

further reducing costs. WWC management’s knowledge of team pay structures rendered

worker visibility so central to Foucauldian paradigmatic definition of power

Takeda & Boyns (2014) studied management accounting development in the Japanese

manufacturing conglomerate Kyocera from 1959 to 2013. The authors aimed to understand

the relationship between the Kyocera corporate philosophy, its “amoeba” management system

(hereafter “management system”) and the associated management accounting system, in

terms of both historical foundations of the principles employed and the development of

[21]
conditioning influences over time. They found a mixture of influences including traditional

Japanese societal and cultural factors, and the management system architect’s personal

philosophies and experiences. They concluded that unique features of the Japanese societal

and corporate setting might preclude translation of the observed management accounting

system into western cultural corporate settings. Their reflecting on researchers the potential

influence on accounting on religion and culture sensitised their analysis to individual and

corporate philosophies and societally based cultural settings that could explain the processes

they observed. While Kyocera’s strategies and processes focused on product quality,

customer satisfaction, profitability and organisational survival, they were distinctive in

positively viewing labour costs by including worker wages as part of profit, adopting open

book management by sharing key organisational performance indicators with employees, and

focusing upon value added rather than on profit, output or cost. The management system

architect’s personal philosophy and the melding of personal and societal beliefs into

management accounting systems were central. Their study revealed risks in attempting to

translate such an approach into a different national cultural setting.

Sargiacomo (2008) studied the Italian fashion house Brioni Roman Style (BRS) which

began in 1945 as a small tailoring shop in Rome crafting elegant fashion garments for elite

international customers. The author set out to examine the major factors that enabled this

small tailoring shop to develop into a high-profile international fashion house. New

institutional sociology historical analysis considered environmental influences in the form

mimetic, normative and coercive pressures and facilitated incorporation of sociological and

economic understandings of strategies and processes in fashion industry organisations. This

revealed acquiescence and compliance with external pressures only when these were

considered consistent with positive functional corporate target outcomes. Where this was not

the case, strategic resistance to isomorphic influences was readily observable for example

[22]
through the company’s rejection of licensing. The study identified two key organisational

actors whose perspectives and actions reflected both their personal agendas and the historical

and cultural setting in which they operated.

Irvine (2012) studied an early sugar plantation and refining mill in Queensland,

Australia focusing on accounting for indentured labour imported from the Pacific islands. The

study examined both technical and rhetorical perspectives. Cheap islander labour was

rationalised as necessary for operating cost containment for delivering strong dividends to

shareholders, and propaganda targeted government for legislative backing and the public at

large for social and political approval. Recognising accounting’s role in transmitting social

values, Irvine examined the organisation’s historical social and cultural context and

calculative accounting practices more varied than the confines of traditional bookkeeping.

The study observes the rhetorical use of accounting calculations and discourse to persuade

target audiences. Irvine reveals the role of accounting in sustaining an organisation through

accounting records employment and associated message construction and transmission. This

historical study has clear resonances with contemporary organisational life, where apparently

economic arguments are mounted to justify various forms of exploitation.

Silva, Rodrigues & Sangster (2019) investigated the use of accounting information in

a 19th century prison in Rio de Janeiro, particularly in relation to the control of captive

prisoners and notionally “Free Africans” who were controlled as slave labourers. Their study

employed Althusser’s ideology concept and the Marxist based concept of labour reproduction

to reveal prison administrator’s employment of accounting information to control the “Free

Africans” in compliance with the ideologies of that location and period. They revealed that

management accounting information did not simply report on and illustrate organisational

activities but was an intervention tool controlling individuals’ organisational lives and

relegating notionally free workers to the roles of slaves. In employing these theoretical

[23]
perspectives in this context, remuneration paid to such workers was revealed as a bonus rather

than minimum wage and was being used as a form of coercion of “Free Africans” to submit

to effective slavery. Accounting is shown as a potent instrument of labour management and

is implicated in relations of power and control.

These case studies, as illustrations, indicate the scope and variety of accounting’s

organisational roles that have been addressed by accounting historians. They also exhibit the

range of theoretical frameworks that can inform historical research investigating how

accounting is embedded within organisational processes and the reciprocal influences that

these may exhibit. Such historical studies reveal organisational processes as infused with

accounting routines and accounting information, privileged by some as “objective” in nature.

These are shown to be used consciously and explicitly by managers to provide selective

“views” of the organisation to internal and external stakeholders as well as delimiting those

aspects of the organisation that are visible to managers and providing a powerful, but

circumscribed, filter through which the organisation is constructed and sustained.

6. EXERCISING POWER AND CONTROL

The contemporary interdisciplinary and critical accounting research literature pays

considerable attention to accounting’s employment in the exercise of power and control, and

accounting history research shares this interest. Organisations are essentially gatherings of

people with explicit or implied organisational hierarchies that deploy accounting to serve the

attainment of both explicit and implicit organisational objectives. Accounting assists in

constituting these objectives through processes of planning and budgeting. As Czarniawska

(2008, p. 29) notes: “budgeting means that one translates actions and events into numbers and

then numbers into actions; its purpose is control”. On the surface, accounting appears to be a

rational, calculative tool for producing what are portrayed as accurate, reliable and auditable

[24]
organisational results. More deeply, accounting allows influence and control to be exerted

over individuals, or groups of stakeholders, in the process of achieving often contestable,

organisational objectives pursued by those in commanding leadership roles.15

West (2001), for instance, examined the novel The Bank Audit written by the

Edinburgh born Bruce Marshall (1899-1987) and published in 1958, with the story of the

novel set in the 1930s Paris banking sector. The novel’s author, was an accountant with

chartered accounting firm experience.16 The Bank Audit alluded to the controlling aspects of

accounting, which was perceived by West (2019) as “a (sub-) theme of the novel”.17 It

featured a chartered accountant character who would periodically arrive home from the office

and declare to his wife: “Surprise cash count!” (1958, p. 180), which she much disliked. This

routine was his means of checking the accuracy of the double-entry household accounts she

was required to maintain on a strictly accurate basis for examination. 18 Marshall (1958),

therefore, illuminated how accounting was implicated in relationships of power and control in

the family home.

Walker & Carnegie (2007) examined how accounting was deployed in the context of

the Australian family home between 1850 and 1920. Australian women (and Melburnian

women in particular) were chastised for their extravagance in dress, specifically for their

appetite for European fashionable clothing and accessories. Household budgeting or

“budgetary earmarking” was enlisted for controlling the “extravagant woman” as a means of

15 Leadership roles, however, need not be restricted merely to conventional business managers.

16 For more information on Marshall and his life and career and on The Bank Audit respectively see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Marshall and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accounting (each last
accessed on 22 November 2019). The book was published as The Bank Audit in the UK, but was otherwise
known as The Accounting.(also see: https://www.amazon.com/Accounting-Bruce-Marshall/dp/B000QKX6C8
(last accessed 22 November 2019).

17 Personal correspondence with one of the authors (…….) on 21 November 2019.

18 In the novel, the household accounts had been checked the Saturday before and the wife had not enough time
to write up the books since that time. She experienced his displeasure and, as readers ascertain, she was
unhappily married.
[25]
constraining women’s expenditure on dress and re-orientating household spending priorities.

The earmarking ideology of patriotic thrift was conveyed by several apparatuses, including

cultural and communications media, the political system and voluntary associations. The

researchers used theoretical perspectives grounded in the work of Zelizer (1989, 1994) and

Althusser (1971), to present “budgetary earmarking as a social process, which is reflective

and constitutive of gendered asymmetries of power in the home” (Walker & Carnegie, 2007,

p.233).

In studying the cross-national diffusion of accounting technology, some accounting

historians have employed the metaphor of “accounting as technology” and applied a

framework, built upon on a series of five questions, initially developed for analysis purposes

by Jeremy (1991, pp. 3-5), in examining the international technology transfer from one

country or region to another (e.g., Carnegie and Parker, 1996; Carnegie, Foreman and West,

2006; Foreman, 2001; Samkin, 2010).19 These authors were particularly concerned with the

adaptation and transfer of accounting technology , by means of the work of individuals with

accounting knowledge and experience, including early accounting authors. Carnegie et al.

answered Jeremy’s specific questions in developing their understanding of F. E. Vigars’

Station Book-keeping: A Treatise on Double Entry Book-keeping for Pastoralists, first

published in 1900 and appearing in five editions until 1937, which they described “as an

episode in the complex process of the adaptation and transfer of accounting technology”

(2006, p. 121). Vigars (1900) believed that “a comprehensive double-entry system was the

‘proper’ system of accounting for this industry and would overcome the inadequacies he

perceived in extant pastoral accounting practices” (Carnegie et al., 2006, pp. 125-126). In

examining the surviving nineteenth century business records of pastoral stations and the

influence of societal culture, Carnegie (1993, 1997) drew on the work of Ansari and Bell

19 Jeremy (1991) recognised that no single model or formula can capture all of the variables involved in the
process of transferring technology from one country or region to others in enabling an understanding of
technology transfer of any genre, including accounting.
[26]
(1991) in studying unregulated accounting, and prior to Vigars’s (1900) treatise on adopting

proper accounting systems for the industry.

Historical studies also provide insights into the constitutive power of accounting. For

example, Riccaboni, Giovannoni, Giorgi, & Moscadelli (2006) applied structuration theory to

study how accounting sustained power relations in a fourteenth century Sienese organisation

(the Opera della Metropolitana di Siena, responsible for building the cathedral in Siena),

while Baños Sánchez-Matamoros, Gutiérrez Hidalgo, Álvarez-Dardet Espejo, & Carrasco

Fenech (2005) employed Foucault and particularly the concept of governmentality to examine

accounting in two eighteenth century Spanish entities – the New Settlements and the Royal

Tobacco Factory of Seville. They found that accounting h operated independently of the

enlightenment discourses informing the two organisations to achieve control over

individuals within those organisations. Examining the gunpowder monopoly in New Spain in

the eighteenth century, Núñez (2002) adopted an institutional sociology perspective to view

accounting as providing multiple functions: as a control instrument allowing long-distance

visibility, as a way of modelling the organisation, and as a supplier of rationality.

In the context of the Portuguese Empire, Gomes, Carnegie & Rodrigues (2014)

examined the development, application and enforcement of accounting rules under the

“Pombaline Era” during the period 1761–1777. Applying the combination of Foucault's

concept of governmentality and Snook's theory of “practical drift” (Snook, 2000), the authors

provided evidence of how accounting control systems were deployed by the Portuguese

government to exercise and maintain control at a distance, thereby mobilising individuals to

pursue its goals for the Empire. These studies demonstrate the fluidity of the concept of

“business” and the ever-present role of the state in the construction and maintenance of

organisations. In the context of the military, McBride & Hines (2019) investigated the

[27]
accounting controls for alcohol in the Royal Navy from 1793 to 1815. The study portrays

details of the rules for accounting for beer and other rations by the purser on board ship.

Foucauldian ideas of governmentality are used to interpret the mechanisms in place to create

control through centrally administered regulations, instructions, and knowledge. Such

controls were imposed to control alcohol consumption in supervising human behaviour in the

Royal Navy.

As a pervasive social practice, accounting guides, shapes or even transforms

organisations. Theories concerned with explaining human behaviour, can assist in

understanding accounting emergence and accounting change across all organisational forms

and in all locales (Carnegie & Napier, 2002). As accounting practices help in sustaining the

organisation and accounting change may lead to, not only result from, changing the

organisation. A full understanding of organisational change relies on an appreciation of what

accounting has been called upon, and enlisted to do, in organisations, across both time and

space.

7. ACCOUNTING AND ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE

One of the most important stimuli for the emergence of the organisational and social

perspective on accounting by the 1980s was the observation that accounting was going

through significant changes, in terms of its roles, methods, and practices, and also the range

of individuals and groups either “doing” accounting or becoming subject to accounting (often

both). Napier (2006) has suggested that a central aspect of much historical accounting

research was the study of how and why accounting changes. More recently, studies have

examined how accounting is involved in organisational change. Accounting does not have a

single role in change processes. In some cases, changes in accounting systems, adopted for a

range of reasons, lead to both expected and unexpected changes in organisations. In other

cases, accounting is mobilised to channel organisations facing new challenges in particular

[28]
directions. In yet other cases, a particular organisational change necessitates changes in

accounting and associated information systems to become effective.

In his study of accounting and organisational change, Hopwood (1990) noted how, in

the 1980s, the restructuring of both commercial and public-sector organisations as internal

markets provided new roles for accounting as the provider of information that made it appear

to managers that it was possible to objectify and measure notions of performance and

efficiency. Other researchers have investigated how management accounting systems enable,

or provide resistance to, attempts to change organisations (for example, Broadbent, 1992;

Burns & Scapens, 2000; Burns & Vaivio, 2001). On the other hand, Quattrone & Hopper

(2001) suggested that change is often analysed in a naïve sense as a transition from one

definite state to a different definite state, whereas they view change as more akin to a process

of “drift” in which accounting support for organisational change “leads to accounting

knowledge being interpreted differently across organizational spaces and times” (Quattrone &

Hopper, 2001, p. 407). This reflects Ciborra’s (2005) concept of how infrastructures drift, by

diverging from plans and targets without any discernible influences causing this change. This

offers accounting historians an unsettled drift alternative to their customary focus on narrative

closure that sees change as resulting in a new and static “equilibrium”.

Furthermore, careful attention to archival evidence is needed in order to determine

whether a discourse of accounting and organisational change has actually manifested itself in

new practices and structures. For example, Zambon & Zan (2007), examined the introduction

of costing calculations and accounting regulations in the Venice Arsenal in the late sixteenth

century. Foucauldian concepts suggested that the regulations would make the actions of those

working in the Arsenal more observable and hence manageable, but the researchers

concluded that the regulations required a regime of enforcement that was not present at the

time, and hence they were unlikely to have had much practical effect for several decades.

[29]
 Many historical studies of accounting and organisational change identify an external

change in the organisation’s environment making the organisation’s functioning contingent

on the introduction of new or changed accounting methods. For example, Bracci, Maran, &

Vagnoni (2010) examined how the absorption of Ferrara into the papal states in 1598

produced changes in a Ferrara institution’s organisational structure. The changes could not be

explained entirely by reference to economic rationality and the search for efficiency, but

reflected the local, time-specific historical context, particularly the replacement of a secular

regime by one paying lip service to religious considerations. Bracci et al. (2010) used

theoretical concepts of governance, accountability and responsibility to help provide an

understanding of how and why the organisation was changing.

With respect to accounting change histories of firms, two examinations of

globalisation in major international accounting firms have drawn on a range of theoretical

insights. Baskerville, Bui, & Fowler (2014) draw on institutional theory to explain why KMG

Kendons, a New Zealand firm with strong international roots, did not survive the 1980s,

finding the firm’s failure attributable an incoherent internal culture that had resulted from a

series of mergers. They model the disappearance of the firm as a process of

“deinstitutionalisation”, where a combination of political, functional (economic), and social

factors eroded the legitimacy of previously taken for granted firm practices. Chandar, Collier,

& Miranti (2014) draw on ideas from the work of Chandler, evolutionary economics and

particularly the analyses of Galambos (2005), in which globalisation and institutional learning

combine with examination of economies of scale and scope to provide an understanding of

how the USA accounting firm Lybrand, Ross Bros. and Montgomery grew through taking

over smaller firms in the country and then faced the shock of merging with the UK firm

Cooper Bros. in 1957 to form Coopers & Lybrand. Chandar et al. (2014) point out that the

personal nature of accounting and auditing work made it difficult for the firm to achieve

[30]
economies of scale, but the increasingly standard nature of this work gave larger firms who

could invest in developing intellectual capital a scope advantage. In their narrative, change is

a gradual and incremental process despite the impact of the 1957 merger – a contrast to the

rapid change and collapse of KMG Kendons.

Many accounting historians prefer to study specific episodes in individual

organisations. However, historical accounting research includes broader studies and

metanarratives. Bryer (2000, 2013) has applied a deep reading of the works of Marx to

examine the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England and the rise of capitalism in

the USA, and how this has affected the nature and form of business organisations such as the

modern corporation (also see Bryer, 2019). He theorises that different modes of production

are associated with different “calculative mentalities”, evidenced by specific “accounting

signatures”. The feudal mentality involves the calculation of consumable surpluses and

periodic accounting focuses on measuring and reporting surpluses of cash and produce. This

is succeeded by the capitalistic mentality, where a primitive rate of return determined by

dividing consumable surplus by opening capital is used by individuals and businesses to

assess performance. The genuine capitalist mentality is identifiable by more sophisticated use

of rate of return (i.e. dividing accounting profit by capital employed, using conventional

accrual accounting).

A sophisticated analysis of the relationship between accounting and management is

that provided by Hoskin, working both alone and with collaborators such as Ezzamel and

Macve (for example, Hoskin & Macve, 1988; Ezzamel, Hoskin, & Macve, 1990; Hoskin,

1998; Hoskin & Macve, 2000). Hoskin draws heavily on the work of Foucault, and this leads

him to place accounting in a central position within organisations: “As the knowledge which

not only renders the financial ‘concrete, precise and measured’, but also, in the guise of

human accounting, coalesces the human into the financial, [accounting] has a special and

[31]
central role” (Hoskin, 1998, p. 106). Rather than the modern business enterprise creating a

demand for accounting information of a particular type, it is human accounting, “a knowledge

which writes, examines and grades” (Hoskin, 1998, p. 106) that makes modern managerialism

possible. Accounting, therefore, is at the root of the fundamental organisational changes of

the modern era.

8. CONCLUSION

Drawing on Llewellyn’s (2003) five levels of theorising, this study has illustrated how

accounting historians develop and use theory and theorising in different ways, from simple

structuring of narratives through the application of models and concepts to help make sense of

historical phenomena, to broad analyses placing accounting at the heart of organisational

change and socio-economic development. This work has been particularly characteristic of

the interdisciplinary and critical accounting historians whose historical examinations and

reflections on the accounting influence upon organisational processes and change offer a rich

and complex understanding of organisational operations historically and today. Present and

past can be connected, particularly through the variety of theories informing such studies as

well as through the further theorisations about organisational functioning and accounting in

action that subsequently emanate. These offer us broad-based and historically derived

contextualised theorisations of organisational life that speak to our contemporary

organisational questions and challenges. Building on this study’s exploration of the role and

diversity of theoretical frameworks evident in accounting history research, it would be

instructive for further research to investigate the full range of theoretical perspectives

employed to date. This would enable any predominant schools of thought to be identified, and

the perspectives and advances in historical knowledge they have offered.

[32]
 What also emerges is the realisation that accounting is not only embedded in the

economic dimensions of organisations, but both reflects and facilitates those organisations’

engagement with their economic, social, cultural and institutional environments. The multiple

theoretical perspectives being drawn upon by accounting historians have not only enlarged

the scope of their inquiries and findings in relation to organisational theory and practice, but

have brought a level of introspection and critique to aspects of organisational activity that is

obscured or even ignored completely by a solely economic rationalist perspective. Thus,

accounting can be found to be implicit and complicit in both functional and dysfunctional

organisational intentions and practices, thereby revealing itself to be at the heart of

organisational decision-making, communication and change. It is from the contextuality and

case-based theory development of rich historical studies that fundamental enhancements to

contemporary organisational theorisation are gradually emerging.

The tension between “history” and “social science” noted by many historiographical

studies in the accounting history arena (e.g., Carnegie, 2014a) still creates challenges for

some accounting historians. Yet this tension has not resulted in any effective barriers being

assembled to historical accounting research, and accounting history may offer lessons to

historians in other disciplines, such as in management and organisational history, in how to

become established as an academic discipline (Richardson, 2008; compare Weatherbee,

2012). Recognising accounting as social practice has offered greater scope and promise for

historical accounting research to be a valuable input for understanding the full implications of

accounting for organisational functioning and development. However, accounting history

researchers tend to draw on existing theories rather than to develop new theories for

application in the field, although they do not leave existing theories unchanged.

Within accounting as an academic subject area, whilst there still exists the competing

theoretical underpinnings of neoclassical economics, Marxism and social theory, traditional

[33]
mainstream accounting research seems to have retreated into questions of a quantitative

nature,20 rather than those of a more human nature. Where accounting history as a part of the

accounting subject area succeeds, is by evading this prevalent epistemology and in viewing

the accounting world with a human eye. In adopting the social turn, accounting history

becomes interesting, critical and relevant. The idea of the prevalence of the social over the

economic has assisted accounting history to emerge as an important and developing area in

accounting. A sub-discipline that assists in elucidating accounting by seeking out the human

element with rich empirical data and theoretically informed narratives. By “locating

accounting as an influential form of calculation and control in the wider processes of

organising” (Hopwood, 2005, p. 585), accounting history has discovered a rich and important

niche and, in the process, provided leadership to contemporary accounting researchers. This

approach is of wider interest in accounting research because understanding the social history

of accounting and control, allows individuals and organisations to understand the full

dimensions of accounting and be better placed to appreciate and avoid future issues.

Similarly, if historians of management and organisations continue to regard

accounting as a fairly technical management function, and not as social practice with

ramifications for human behaviour, then they are likely to overlook the substantive

contributions of accounting historians to theoretical understandings of what organisations are

and how they are sustained and changed. Gomes et al. (2011, p. 393) observe, accounting

historians need to engage with a broad range of disciplines (they mention in particular “those

studying the histories of finance, management, business and economics”) in mutually

beneficial research. Accounting history potentially contributes to existing narratives written

within a business history context, and helps researchers to develop integrated understandings

20 The “mainstream” of contemporary accounting research is dominated by what has been referred to as the
“archival-empirical” approach (Anonymous, 1988), where huge data-bases of security prices and accounting
data, often going back over several decades, are mined for inputs into sophisticated econometric analyses
designed to test hypotheses derived (almost without exception) from naïve versions of neo-classical economics.

[34]
of organisations that pay due attention to all organisational activities and functions, and to

locate organisations firmly within the context of space and time. More practically, historical

accounting research has already faced many of the challenges envisaged by organisational

researchers wishing to reinvigorate their discipline by inject history and theory driven

explanations into their research.

The social turn gave accounting historians’ another advantage by opening the door to

examination of the full range of accounting's social roles including, but not limited to,

economic calculation. These theoretical possibilities hardly exist in a technical or economic

view of accounting that focuses almost exclusively on 'rational' decision-making, except

perhaps for the transhistorical 'agency theory'. The freedom given by the social turn explains

why accounting historians' case-studies show the variety and range of the organisational roles

of accounting. Indeed, these studies impacted by the social turn are now mainstream in

historical accounting research. They fill the theoretical space for the human aspects of the

organisational and social functioning of accounting, including its role of pursuing

accountability. In this way, accounting is positioned at the centre of organisational decisions,

change and communication, and can be implicit and complicit in organisations’ functional

and dysfunctional intentions and practices.

Studying accounting in the contexts in which it operates concerns both defining and

reflecting those contexts. This means that accounting history provides indicators of a way

forward for historians in business, management and organisational history who wish to apply

and develop theories that are contingent and contextual, speaking to both the past and the

present. An outcome may be the facilitation of dialogue leading to greater collaboration

between historians of organisations, management, business, and accounting, thereby

providing the potential cross-fertilisation all these disciplines. We have already noted the

observation of Czarniawska (2008, p. 31) that, without an appreciation of accounting, “is it

[35]
impossible to understand today’s management” (Czarniawska, 2008, p. 31). Similarly,

without an appreciation of accounting history, particularly one based on the theoretically

informed research of the past three to four decades, constituting a social turn in the literature,

it is impossible fully to understand today’s accounting and its impacts as social practice.

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public,

commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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