This paper aims to fill a gap in the scant literature on accounting practices in non-Anglo-Saxon countries in underresearched periods by exploring the Monte di Pietà of Ravenna, an Italian non-profit institution. The research draws upon original 18 th and 19 th century documents found in the Monte di Pietà of Ravenna and offers an internal perspective of the development of accounting technology before and after an 'intacco' episode, thus attempting to shed light on the significance of accounting in that context. The originality of the Ravenna episode, compared to other similar ones experienced by Monti, consists in its extension over time and in its recurrence by three generations of administrators linked by kinship bonds, who systematically damaged the Monte between 1797 and 1837. The new form of control of the Monte's activities after the "intacco" based on accounting technologies, and realised a new relation between power and knowledge in which accounting was the tool to exercise disciplinary power, thus making people more governable. Accounting technologies relied upon a more articulated financial statement that included the institute's transactions and events.
Recent literature has clearly charted the growth of pawn credit in nineteenth-century developing countries in Europe. Such expansion has frequently been associated with governments’ concerns to prevent malpractice and promote the establishment of public agencies that mirrored the Italian Monti di pietà. Precisely at the time modernizing European societies adopted the model of Italian public pawn banks, Monti were being dismissed as a relic of a bygone age in their home country. Assembling and comparing data from an 1896 national survey, we conclude that, contrary to traditional assumptions, Italian pawn banks were not obsolete or out of place in the European context of nineteenth-century pawn credit. However, ideology and hostile legislation did hamper the access to credit of those most in need, and the choice hardly assisted the modernizing spurt of Italian society.
In the field of business administration, the management practices adopted by Third sector organisations have made economic associations a topic of growing interest for several years now. The origins of this heterogeneous group of entities can actually be traced far back in time. The main associative form of post-unification Italy’s farming class was comizi agrari, which were private organizations with public functions. By redefining their nature as multistakeholder non-profit organizations, this research takes on the task of re-examining historiography’s negative evaluation of comizi’s effectiveness. Out of the analysis regarding the comizi operating in Romagna, it is evident the nature of some successful comizi is characterised by certain key factors such as the value of organisational, institutional, and technical leadership, the ability to develop strategic services for stakeholders that were not effectively provided by enterprises or the public sector, an attention to financial sustainability, a careful orientation towards building institutional networks.
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