The farm as an accounting laboratory: an essay on the history of accounting and agriculture

Abstract

The shop, the factory, the office: these appear, to the popular imaginary, as natural sites for accounting, and for accountants. They are the places where accounting is usually said to be invented and practised, the places where accounting sustains business. The shop stands for commerce, which reportedly saw the emergence of double-entry bookkeeping in the so-called 'commercial revolution' of the early-modern times. The factory stands out as the chief target of management accounting from the nineteenth century and its 'industrial revolution'. The office is where accounting clerks work, but also itself an object of productive accountability in the 'service economy' of the twentieth century. The farm, on the contrary, seems like a distant, almost exotic site for accounting. Who would ever picture the accountant in the fields? This impression is the consequence of a long-standing and more general historiographical bias in the study of agriculture. It is not just agricultural lands that were enclosed in the latemodern period; scholarship on agriculture was also a victim of enclosure. Even

Biblioscene

“…His portrayal of agrarian society, before and during the emergence of capitalism, invites the attention of accounting historians, especially those seeking to track profit-seeking mentalities on the farm during periods of transition (Bryer, 2006). His focus also affirms the potential insights to be gained from exploring the social functioning of accounting in the agricultural economy and rural society, in addition to more conventional industrial-urban sites (Giraudeau, 2017;Walker, 2014Walker, , 2015.…”

Overview of cost accounting practices in France from the early 19th century to the 1880s

“…Progress means change for the better. According to Edwards (1989: vi): ‘change does not, of course, necessarily mean progress.’ Authors who have researched the development of costing in nineteenth century France saw that progress was not linear but rather a process of trial and error (Lemarchand, 1993a, 1993b; Nikitin, 1992; Zimnovitch, 1997). Boyns and Edwards (2013), analysing the British case, questioned the idea of progress in costing/management accounting, although there has clearly been much change (as well as continuity) over the centuries.…”

“…While our main interest is in cost accounting, we will, without going to much off-track, sometimes refer to financial accounting. Cost accounting was not fully autonomous in the analysed timeframe, as it maintained close links with double entry financial accounting which was becoming increasingly used both in France and England (Boyns and Edwards, 2007, 2013; Boyns et al, 1997a; Lemarchand, 1993a, 1993b; Nikitin 1992). Furthermore, the costs to be computed in financial accounting and in cost accounting were very similar, illustrated by the fact that depreciation was included in these costs.…”

“…We have examined changes in costing techniques from the time of the first cost accounting manuals that appeared in the 1820s to when industrial accounting had come into general use and was being taught, starting in the 1860s and reaching maturity around 1880s (Boyns et al, 1997a, 1997b) which is around the time agricultural accounting fell into oblivion 2 and developments in railway accounting were stagnating. This period is also very rich from the point of view of costing history, as it corresponds to the time when a corpus of management accounting theory emerged both in France and in Great Britain and when managers were seeking to understand how to reach the total cost when apportioning overheads to processes and products (Boyns et al, 1997a; Lemarchand, 1993a, 1993b; Nikitin, 1992).…”

Institutionalisation of Knowledge-based Growth: the Case of the Dutch-Frisian Dairy Sector (1895–1950)

“…Cognitive aspects were explored as one of the drivers of agricultural modernisation, and theoretical contributions stressed the importance of institutions that stimulate the use and transfer of knowledge (Mokyr, 2004;. For example, accounting systems at the level of an individual firm have been the subject of recent research (Giraudeau, 2017;Lampe and Sharp, 2017). Institutes of knowledge-based growth are being studied on the basis of, for example, educational facilities (Vivier, 2008) and agronomists and extension services (Flückiger, 2013).…”