Accounting’s past, present and future: the unifying power of history

Correspondence details:

Introduction

[T]he historical study of accounting has been motivated by a quest for understanding, a belief that accounting is more than a repertoire of timeless techniques for measurement, calculation and control of economic phenomena. While accounting history studies the residues of the past, it speaks to the present and the future.

Accounting is, above all, a human practice, and like all human practices it is based on human interaction. Such interaction is grounded in what went before – both individuals and organisations may be regarded as “learners”, whose current thoughts and actions are to a large extent the effect of their own past and the past of the societies and settings in which they live and interact. This is true of all human behaviour, and accounting is no exception. The intuitions that shape the decisions of preparers, users and auditors, and the financial and management information that they use, are the product of experience. Whenever the cry goes up “This time is different”, it is likely that society is forgetting that even new paradigms operate in settings determined by past beliefs and practices.¹

The importance of historical understanding applies to accounting as much as to other fields of human endeavour. History can inform our appreciation of contemporary accounting thought and practice through its power of unifying past, present and future. Our current activities, when viewed through the lens of history, appear neither eternal nor ephemeral, but are grounded in their past. At the same time, the historical perspective allows society to assess the future of accounting and its artefacts and manifestations. Accounting is both valued and criticised as a human activity, and history provides a framework for evaluating accounting’s impacts on individuals, organisations and society not just in the past but also today.

This evaluation can be undertaken in different ways, and poses many possible questions. How have we arrived at today’s accounting ideas, practices and institutions? What made certain developments possible and ruled others out? What tacit assumptions based on accounting’s past are shaping current thinking, and in what ways does the past cast a long shadow over the present? What are the forces that explain why, when and how accounting changes, or perhaps stagnates? What is the best “metahistory” for accounting, one of progress, one of decline from a “golden age”, or some other overarching narrative – indeed, are grand narratives, such as appeals to a metaphor of evolution, particularly helpful (Napier, 2001)? These questions, and others, firmly define the historical study of accounting as something that can and should inform current accounting thought and practice. Other questions are more the domain of the historian, but are still important in encouraging particular research practices and directions. What is the role of theory for the accounting historian? Is accounting history basically “historical social science”,² or does it straddle other fundamental bodies of research method? What is the nature and role of evidence (Napier, 2002)? Do accounting historians make a fetish of the “archive”, or is their view of what constitutes the archive a narrow one (Gaffikin, 2011)?

A particular feature of the collective effort of accounting historians is their willingness to reflect on their discipline, with a long series of books and papers addressing the question posed some 20 years ago by Miller and Napier (1990): “How and why should we do the history of accounting?” The present paper adds to this reflective literature, looking back to the AAAJ special issue on accounting history and its impact, and forward to future possibilities for historical accounting research. The objectives of the paper are (1) to narrate the background to the special issue, including its origins and process of development; (2) to examine, mainly through citation analysis, the impact of the papers in the special issue; (3) to consider subsequent research within the eight research themes that we highlighted in our paper in the special issue (Carnegie and Napier, 1996); (4) to provide a summary assessment of the effect of the special issue; and to reflect on the future of historical accounting research.