On the social history of accounting: The Bank Audit by Bruce Marshall

113

Accounting History celebrated a milestone at the end of 2010 -its first 15 years as an international refereed journal. This paper examines and provides commentary on the articles that have appeared in the journal from 1996 to 2010 using a series of thematic landscapes depicting dominant research trends and trajectories. Addressed are issues connected with the emergence of new themes, methods and topics, and the relative decline of other areas of historical accounting research. The investigation of these landscapes also provided the opportunity to explore and advance ideas concerning some unanswered calls and prospects in mapping the future content and profile of Accounting History.

Section: The Historiographical Landscape Of Accounting Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Surveying the landscape: The first 15 years of Accounting History as an international journal

Bisman

2012

113

“…Other authors have also made important contributions in related but distinct areas, including the household (Carnegie and Walker, 2007a, 2007b; Llewellyn and Walker, 2000; Walker, 1998, 2003b; Walker and Llewellyn, 2000); lifestyle and occupational differentiation in Victorian accountancy (Edwards and Walker, 2010); child accounting texts published in the US during the early to mid-twentieth century (Walker, 2010); the circus (Cummings and St Leon, 2009); and works of fiction, such as Gustav Freytag’s Soll Und Haben (Maltby, 1997) and The Bank Audit by Bruce Marshall (West, 2001). Czarniawska (2008) focused on changing perceptions of accounting across time and different cultural contexts, with special emphasis on gender issues, through the novels of Douglas Adams, and in a later contribution explored accounting across time and space via detective novels (Czarniawska, 2012: 661).…”

Section: Literature Review Methods and Archival Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting and the history of the everyday life of captains, sailors and common seamen in eighteenth-century Portuguese slave trading

Pinto

West

2017

This archive-based case study uses accounting and related records to uncover details of the everyday life of the captains, sailors and seamen who manned the ships that allowed Portuguese slave trading to flourish during the eighteenth century. By elaborating the lives of the crews of the ships of the Companhia Geral do Grão Pará e Maranhão, a Portuguese chartered company created in 1755 for the express purpose of slave trading, the study contributes to a growing body of literature that uses accounting documents as a source of social history and enables previously silent voices to be heard. Furthermore, the study brings together two notions which have previously remained separated in the accounting history literature: the everyday lives of participants within the setting of a ‘dark’ episode of human history.

“…The interrelationship between accounting and social and cultural influences is not new but has been recognised frequently in the accounting history literature (see, for example, Previts, Parker and Coffman, 1990;West, 2001;Carnegie, 2004). Nevertheless, the call to accounting historians is to adopt more microhistorical methods to enable studies to move from the general to the particular, and to reveal pertinent influential variables that might otherwise remain hidden.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The struggle to develop accounting practices in the Australian Girl Guides, 1945—9: a microhistorical approach

Abraham

2008

There has been limited accounting history research in the areas of nonprofit organisations and women in a non-business environment. This paper addresses these two gaps by considering accounting history in a large female-managed nonprofit organisation, the Australian Girl Guides Association (GGA). To do this the paper uses a microhistorical reconstruction of an individual to penetrate underlying motivations (Parker, 1999, p. 31) and to allow the reader "to draw conclusions from a story that illustrates a fragment of peoples' lives and activities" (Williams, 1999, p. 75) by revealing what would otherwise be unknown about the struggle to develop appropriate accounting practices in the context of organisational culture and history. It discloses that pertinent recommendations by GGA's fourth treasurer, Mrs O'Malley Wood, were ignored by management in a fiscally irresponsible manner. This paper demonstrates that by focussing close attention on a seemingly minor individual, the researcher is able to discover the possible constraints that shaped human behaviour at specific moment in history. AbstractThere has been limited accounting history research in the areas of nonprofit organisations and women in a non-business environment. This paper addresses these two gaps by considering accounting history in a large female-managed nonprofit organisation, the Australian Girl Guides Association (GGA). To do this the paper uses a microhistorical reconstruction of an individual to penetrate underlying motivations (Parker, 1999, p. 31) and to allow the reader "to draw conclusions from a story that illustrates a fragment of peoples' lives and activities" (Williams, 1999, p. 75) by revealing what would otherwise be unknown about the struggle to develop appropriate accounting practices in the context of organisational culture and history. It discloses that pertinent recommendations by GGA's fourth treasurer, Mrs O'Malley Wood, were ignored by management in a fiscally irresponsible manner. This paper demonstrates that by focussing close attention on a seemingly minor individual, the researcher is able to discover the possible constraints that shaped human behaviour at specific moment in history.