Historical elaboration of Foucault's concept of 'power-knowledge" can explain both the late-medieval developments in accounting technology and why the near-universal adoption of a discourse of accountancy is delayed until the nineteenth century. It is the disciplinary techniques of elite medieval educational institutions -the new universities and their examinations -that generate new power-knowledge relations. These techniques embody forms of textual rewriting (including the new 'alphanumeric" system) from which the accounting advances are produced and "control" is formalised. "Double-entry" is an aspect of these rewritings, linked also to the new writing and rewritings of money, especially the bill of exchange. By the eighteenth century accounting technologies are feeding back in a general way into educational practice (e.g. in the deployment of "book-keeping" on pupils) and this culminates in the introduction of the written examination and the mathematical mark. A new regime of "objective" evaluation of total populations, made up of individually "calculable" subjects, is thereby engendered and then extended -apparently tirst in the U.S. railroads -into modern comprehensive management and financial accounting systems (systems of "accountability" embodying Foucault's "reciprocal hierarchical observation" and "normalising judgement"), while written examinations become used to legitimate the newly autonomous pro. fession of accountancy.It is inadequate to attempt to explain the signif?-came of accounting in modern society by identifying any clear link between its use and the improvement of "rational economic decision taking" (Burchell et al., 1980). Yamey (e.g. 1964)has refuted "the Sombart thesis" and shown that there is no clear link to be found between the rise of Renaissance capitalism and the invention of "double-entry" bookkeeping and one can similarly refute suggestions that the lack of modern accounting techniques in itself explams the apparent lack of economic rationality in antiquity (Macve, 1985). How then is one to explain the modern significance of accounting and the ample rewards that accrue to its practitioners? This is a complex question but in this paper we propose to suggest how a history of accounting and an understanding of its power in modern society might be written in terms of Michel Foucault's theory of "power-knowledge" relations.Our main argument focuses on two separate ' We gratefully acknowledge the helpful discussion and criticism of an earlier draft of this paper provided by Simon Archer,

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In attempting to understand the genesis and scope of modern cost and management accounting systems, accounting historians adopting what has been labeled a “Foucauldian” approach have been rewriting the history of key 18th and 19th century developments in the U.K. and U.S. through new evidence, new interpretation, and a refocusing of attention on familiar events. This is a “disciplinary” history which sees modern cost and management accounting as articulating a new kind of “expert disciplinary knowledge,” as well as exercising a “disciplinary power,” in the construction of a new human accountability. However, this “disciplinary” view has been challenged by more “economic rationalist” historians, e.g., Boyns and Edwards [1996] for the British Industrial Revolution and Tyson [1998] for the U.S., as being too narrowly concerned with labor control. This paper takes up the gauntlet. It addresses the theoretical issues and seeks to clarify the import of the “disciplinary view” and its contribution to understanding how 19th century accounting practices shaped emerging managerial discourses, initially in the U.S. It argues that, until businesses adopted this new disciplinarity, there remained an absence of practices focused on calculating human performance, and accounting was not fully deployed to construct that system of “administrative coordination” [Chandler, 1977] which distinguishes modern management action and control.