Two Hundred Years Of Accounting Research

This is the first and only book to offer a comprehensive survey of accounting research on a broad international scale for the last two centuries. Its main emphasis is on accounting research in the English, German, Italian, French and Spanish language areas; it also contains chapters dealing with research in Finland, the Netherlands, Scand

Financial accounting theory has numerous practical applications and policy implications, for instance, international accounting standard setters are increasingly relying on theoretical accounting concepts in the creation of new standards; and corporate regulators are increasingly turning to various conceptual frameworks of accounting to guide regulation and the interpretation of accounting practices. The global financial crisis has also led to a new found appreciation of the social, economic and political importance of accounting concepts generally and corporate financial reporting in particular. For instance, the fundamentals of capital market theory (i.e. market efficiency) and measurement theory (i.e. fair value) have received widespread public and regulatory attention. This comprehensive, authoritative volume provides a prestige reference work which offers students, academics, regulators and practitioners a valuable resource containing the current scholarship and practice in the established field of financial accounting theory.

Is society possible without accounting? In speech or in writing, we communicate actions, plans and decisions using numbers, calculations, words and images. Although accounting research is dominated by quantitative analyses, the role of accounting in society is firmly established over thousands of years. In this concise book, Lisa Jack demonstrates the power of social theory in expanding the value of accounting research. Accounting and Social Theory: An introduction includes advice on research problems as well as guidance on fertile areas for new research. The tools, techniques and developments covered by the author help readers to see social research in accounting as the study of the use, misuse and abuse of accounting communications by people and the effects that this has on social relationships. Stories of accounting in war, agriculture and food, gender, health and other areas illustrate the ways in which the threads of accounting run through society. Having emerged from the author’s wealth of teaching experience, this book provides a student-focused treasure trove that illuminates the field for early-career researchers in accounting and established academics looking to expand the impact of their work.

The field of critical accounting has expanded rapidly since its inception and has become recognised as offering a wealth of provocative insights in the wake of the global financial crisis. It is now firmly embedded within accounting literature and in how accounting is taught. Surveying the evolving field of Critical Accounting, including theory, ethics, history, development and sustainability, this Companion presents key debates in the field, providing a comprehensive overview. Incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives on accounting, the volume concludes by considering new directions in which critical accounting research may travel. With an international array of established and respected contributors, this Routledge Companion is a vital resource for students and researchers across the world.

This book offers a short history of business administration in four parts. Part 1 takes the reader from 8000 BCE with the development of simple control techniques to the middle of the nineteenth century. At this time, normative, empirical, and theoretical approaches to business problems in the industrial area were developed. Furthermore, more powerful methodologies came into use. In Part 2, the criteria for science are discussed and related to the development of business administration as a science at the beginning of the twentieth century. Part 3 demonstrates, using Germany as an example, the development of business administration as strongly influenced by its societal environment. The cases of National Socialist Germany, the socialist environment of the German Democratic Republic, and the reconstruction of an academic-inspired business administration in Western Germany are provided as illustrative examples. Part 3 also presents a typology of major specializations in business administration, examples of their development, and a proposal for a curricular approach to the discipline. The fourth and final part presents the benefits of studying the history of management ideas. This book is useful for academics in business administration, advanced students, and anyone who seeks to understand recent developments in business administration.

Italian accounting has a long and honourable tradition of theoretical and applied analysis of the accounting and reporting function, perceived and defined much more broadly than in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. The high point of this perhaps, is the creation of what is known as Economia Aziendale (EA). The antecedents, genesis and later developments are presented here in detail by highly knowledgeable specialists in the field. EA takes as a prerequisite the necessity of the business (entity/azienda) to ensure its own long-run survival. This requires that the necessary resources are retained and preserved, so operating capital maintenance, by definition future-oriented, is essential. It requires a focus on the particular business organization, entity-specific and consistent with today's notion of the business model. Entity-specific information relevant to current and future cash flows is a necessary pre-requisite for ensuring long-run survival, which historical cost accounting, or fair value (being market-specific not entity-specific) satisfactorily achieve. Flexibility of valuation and of reporting, always relevant to the specific asset at the specific time in the specific place, is a necessary condition for effective management. This is exactly the focus of EA and its analysis and tradition. Scholars and advanced students of international regulation and accounting, as well as accounting history, will find this an invaluable guide to a vibrant, scholarly tradition of great practical relevance today.

This book critically analyses the extensive forms of societal regulatory requirements using forms of Accounting Control, particularly those that are exerted over public sector organisations and the strategies of Controlling Accounting that are used by these organisations to minimise the effects of these requirements.

A History of Corporate Financial Reporting provides an understanding of the procedures and practices which constitute corporate financial reporting in Britain, at different points of time, and how and why those practices changed and became what they are now. Its particular focus is the external financial reporting practices of joint stock companies. This is worth knowing about given the widely held view that Britain (i) pioneered modern financial reporting, and (ii) played a primary role in the development of both capital markets and professional accountancy. The book makes use of a principal and agent framework to study accounting’s past, but one where the failure of managers always to supply the information that users’ desire is given full recognition. It is shown that corporate financial reporting did not develop into its current state in a straightforward and orderly fashion. Each era produces different environmental conditions and imposes new demands on accounting. A proper understanding of accounting developments therefore requires a careful examination of the interrelationship between accountants and accounting techniques on the one hand and, on the other, the social and economic context within which changes took place. The book’s corporate coverage starts with the legendary East India Company, created in 1600, and continues through the heyday of the statutory trading companies founded to build Britain’s canals (commencing in the 1770s) and railways (commencing c.1829) to focus, principally, on the limited liability company fashioned by the Joint Stock Companies Act 1844 and the Limited Liability Act 1855. The story terminates in 2005 when listed companies were required to prepare their consolidated accounts in accordance with International Financial Reporting Standards, thus signalling the effective end of British accounting.

This book deals with current discussion of the classic works by two prominent authors on accounting, R. Mattessich and Y. Ijiri. Their antecedents, and the way in which each author came to construct his work, make up the central subject of this study.

The critical tradition in accounting historiography has come to occupy a prominent place in the discipline's academic scholarship. Some critical literature has confronted the responsibility of accounting and accountants in precipitating contemporary crises, such as the audit failures that spawned Sarbanes-Oxley and the world-wide recession. Certain contemporary issues have long histories, such as the difficulties encountered by women to break the glass ceiling in public accounting, and the suffering of indigenous peoples under the imperialistic yoke. Other episodes in accounting's long history are seemingly more divorced from the present, but in reality they all have contemporary significance. Slavery in the New World, for example, although abolished more than a century ago, is still rampant in parts of the world, albeit less formally. Critical accounting historians feel it a duty to harken to the "suppressed voices" of the past, those groups of people who had no access to an accounting record - women, persons of color, indigenous populations, alienated proletarians, victims of governmental incompetence and graft, and many voiceless others. Critical Histories of Accounting: Sinister Inscriptions in the Modern Era draws on the foremost work in this developing literature, both that authored by the co-editors of this volume, and that written by others. Editors Richard K. Fleischman, Warwick N. Funnell, and Steve Walker have written extensively about "the dark side of accounting," gauging the complicity of those performing accounting functions in episodes in human history that are at worst evil and at best reprehensible. The editors have also hand-selected a series of historical and contemporary episodes that have been critically investigated by the wider accounting history community, preceded by a thorough introduction.