Routledge New Works in Accounting History – serie

Consumption of alcohol is a globally ubiquitous, often controversial activity, and business organizations in this sector are of significant social and economic relevance. This book draws on accounting records from the sector to reveal fresh and unique insights into the historic development of the production of alcoholic beverages.Offering a historic overview of the three major areas of the alcohol industry – brewing, distilling and wine – this book reveals the commonalities and differences which are present in the industry, while also highlighting its social impact. The editors bring together contributions from around the world, including Mexico, France, Japan and Ireland, to demonstrate how accounting has developed over time. Offering diverse geographical and historical perspectives, it explores multiple aspects of accounting within the industry, including internal control, earnings management, competition, and regulatory aspects. The fascinating insights into breweries, wineries, spirit distillers, vineyards and other related organizations provides a unique historic perspective of accounting systems, techniques and practices.Drawing on an international range of examples and rich archival material, this valuable research collection will be of great interest to researchers and advanced students of accounting and business history.

Raymond John Chambers was born just over a century ago on 16 November 1917. It is more than fifty years since his first classic, Accounting, Evaluation and Economic Behavior, was published, more than forty since Securities and Obscurities: Reform of the Law of Company Accounts (republished in 1980 as Accounting in Disarray) and over twenty since the unique An Accounting Thesaurus: Five Hundred Years of Accounting. They are drawn upon extensively in this biography of Chambers’ intellectual contributions, as are other of his published works. Importantly, we also analyze archival correspondence not previously examined. While Chambers provided several bibliographical summaries of his work, without the benefits of reviewing and interspersing the text with correspondence materials from the Chambers Archive this study would lack an appreciation of the impact of his early childhood, and nuances related to his practical (including numerous consultancies) and academic experiences. The ‘semi-biographical narrative’ codifies article and editorial length exercises by the authors drawing on parts of the archive related to theory development, measurement and communication. Other parts are also examined. This allows us to respond to those critics who claim his reforms were naive. They further reveal a man of theory and practice, whose theoretical ideas were solidly grounded on observations from his myriad interests and experiences. Many of his practical experiences have not been examined previously. This approach and the first book-length biography differentiates this work from earlier analyses of Chambers’ contribution to the accounting literature. We provide evidence to support the continued push for the reforms he proposed to accepted accounting thought and practice to ensure accounting is the serviceable technology so admired by Pacioli, Da Vinci and many other Renaissance pioneers. It will be of interest to researchers, educators, practitioners and regulators alike.

The Origins Of Accounting Culture aim at studying the origins of the accounting culture in Venice, with a specific focus on accounting education. The period covered by the work ranges from Luca Pacioli to the foundation (in 1868) of the Royal Advanced School of Commerce (Regia Scuola Superiore di Commercio), that in 2018 is celebrating its 150 anniversary as Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.Ever since the Middle Ages, Venice was home of a number of favourable circumstances that have been accumulating over the years. As a trading city par excellence, Venice allowed the spreading of the bookkeeping at first among firms and then in the public administration that was much in need of sophisticated accounting principles for the purpose of controlling its activities.Venice was among the first cities to implement Gutenberg print method and it quickly became the most important city in the world in the publishing industry, allowing printing and spreading the first handbooks about double-entry bookkeeping and merchant studies.The Origins Of Accounting Culture goes beyond the study of Luca Pacioli and tackles in a more organic and holistic way the social and economic conditions that allowed the accounting culture to spread in Venice. This book will be a vital resource to academics and researchers in the fields of Accounting, Accounting History, Economic Development and related disciplines.

The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History provides compelling evidence of how accounting, when conceived of as a technology rather than simply as a tool to increase efficiency, can work as a means to sustain power relations in different sites, such as the Church, the State or the factory. This book, drawing upon the growing body of work which focuses on Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, demonstrates how accounting practices were effective in the subjugation of single individuals or entire populations, whether Roman Catholic priests, State functionaries, inhabitants of conquered lands or workers. The effectiveness of accounting as a tool of power is linked to its neutral and technical appearance, which makes it difficult for those oppressed and controlled by its practices to oppose it. Its adaptability to different organizational contexts, as documented in The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History, makes it a valuable tool for sustaining existing power relations and reproducing inequalities and exploitation.The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History is vital reading for academics and researchers in the fields of accounting, accounting history, political management and sociology and European history.

This book investigates the issues raised by the vast array of accounting standards and technical rules which have marked the recent history of accounting. It is argued that the accounting profession is beset by an inferior and incomplete notion of quality in its work which emphasises compliance with processing rules, rather than the correspondence with commercial phenomena necessary to make financial statements reliable guides for human activity.

This book focuses upon the Institute of Accounts (IA), an organization to which the modern United States accounting profession can trace its roots. The IA was organized in the early 1880s in New York City and, as discussed in this book, attracted a diverse membership that included some of the leading accounting thinkers of the period. The Institute of Accounts describes the association's early development, its usefulness to the needs of bookkeepers and accountants in the late nineteenth century, and its historical importance.

This Volume, edited by Peter W. Wolnizer, Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney, makes available the collected writings of Walter P. Scheutze, a senior accounting practitioner. The articles, speeches and letters collected here probe the most fundamental problems of corporate financial reporting, cogently arguing the case for accounting reform and proposing well-informed solutions to these problems.

One of the outstanding accounting theoreticians of the twentieth century, Carl Thomas Devine exhibited a breadth and depth of knowledge few in the field of accounting have equalled. This book collects together eight previously unpublished essays on accounting theory written by Professor Devine.Professor Devine passed away in 1998, prior to the significant scandals that have plagued accounting and business since the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen. Many of the essays collected here are particularly important given these events. The first three essays are devoted to ethics and provide profound insights into the importance of a profession's ethical presuppositions. The book then presents essays, which provide a critical examination of the relevance of hermeneutics and deconstruction to an understanding of accounting practice and an analysis of the academic 'game' particularly with respect to Professor Devine's experiences in the Florida university system. The final essay in the volume is devoted to a critique of rational choice theory applications in accounting. Revisiting and building upon themes developed in earlier work, this collection of essays will be essential reading for accounting historians, accounting theoreticians and all those interested in the work of Carl Thomas Devine.

The rise of the British accountancy profession from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and the world-wide success of its accountancy firms, were to a large extent based on the growth of the audit function.This book explores the history of the audit process in Britain, demonstrating that the characteristic features of the auditing industry are a diversity in practice based largely on the different types of clients the auditors serve. The book examines the innovation that was brought about by the staggering developments in information technology which have been seen over the last few centuries.This comprehensive history will be a useful reference tool for accounting, business and economic historians and will also be an enlightening read for all those with an interest in auditing procedures.

The book presents a series of researched biographies of professional accountants who immigrated to the United States and developed their careers there in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This volume is a tribute to the efforts of a relatively small group of Scots who helped to establish and nurture American public accountancy at a time when demand for its services greatly exceeded the ability of native-born accountants to provide them.

There is growing interest in the history of accounting amongst both accounting practitioners and accounting academics. This interest developed steadily from about 1970 and really ‘took off’ in the 1990s. However, there is a lack of texts dealing with major aspects of accounting history that can be used in classrooms, to inform new researchers, and to provide a source of reference for established researchers.The great deal of research into cost and management accounting in Britain published in academic journals over the last twenty years–including the authors' own contributions–makes The History of Cost and Management Accounting an essential contribution to the field.

Goodwill, sometimes purchased but often more significantly internally generated, is the major constituent of the value of many listed companies. Accounting aims to provide users of financial statements with useful information, and more than fifty current International Financial Reporting Standards prescribe accounting disclosure requirements in minute detail. However, these Standards dismiss internally generated goodwill with a single brief provision that it is not to be brought to account at all. The impairment regime now laid down for dealing with purchased goodwill contains severe flaws, while previous methods have also been found to be unsatisfactory.This book traces the history of the goodwill accounting controversy in detail and demonstrates that it has been a prime example of an issue ‘conceived in a way that it is in principle unsolvable’. It explores the problem of recognising the importance of goodwill as a whole and finding a way of presenting meaningful information regarding it in the context of the financial statements. The author’s proposed solution builds upon research undertaken and uses a Market Capitalization Statement, based on a modification of nineteenth century ‘double accounting’ in a modern context. Examples show that the proposed Market Capitalization Statement has the potential to provide significant information not currently available form conventional financial statements, which in turn are freed to present clearer information.

This Volume, edited by Peter W. Wolnizer, Professor of Accounting at the University of Sydney, makes available the collected writings of Walter P. Scheutze, a senior accounting practitioner. The articles, speeches and letters collected here probe the most fundamental problems of corporate financial reporting, cogently arguing the case for accounting reform and proposing well-informed solutions to these problems.

This book brings together, for the first time, studies of the professionalisation of accountancy in key constituent territories of the British Empire. The late nineteenth century was a period of intensive activity in terms of both imperialism and professionalisation. A team of expert contributors has examined profession-state engagements between Britain, on the one hand and Canada, South Africa, Australia, Nigeria, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, India and Kenya, and the other with a view to assessing how the organizations of accountancy in the colonies was affecting the metropolitan profession and state agents- and vice versa. Their contributions highlight the peculiarities of the professionalization processes in variant social, economic and political environments linked together by the relays of empire, prompting reflection on both the common and disparate dynamics involved.This book has numerous objectives, including giving historical insight and focus on countries that provide contrasting and variant examples of the uptake of the "British model", and broadening the appeal of accounting history and professionalisation as a taught subject in university accounting departments.

Goodwill, sometimes purchased but often more significantly internally generated, is the major constituent of the value of many listed companies. Accounting aims to provide users of financial statements with useful information, and more than fifty current International Financial Reporting Standards prescribe accounting disclosure requirements in minute detail. However, these Standards dismiss internally generated goodwill with a single brief provision that it is not to be brought to account at all. The impairment regime now laid down for dealing with purchased goodwill contains severe flaws, while previous methods have also been found to be unsatisfactory.This book traces the history of the goodwill accounting controversy in detail and demonstrates that it has been a prime example of an issue ‘conceived in a way that it is in principle unsolvable’. It explores the problem of recognising the importance of goodwill as a whole and finding a way of presenting meaningful information regarding it in the context of the financial statements. The author’s proposed solution builds upon research undertaken and uses a Market Capitalization Statement, based on a modification of nineteenth century ‘double accounting’ in a modern context. Examples show that the proposed Market Capitalization Statement has the potential to provide significant information not currently available form conventional financial statements, which in turn are freed to present clearer information.

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, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine as well as Argentina and Japan. In a time of financial globalization, familiarity with accounting research in countries beyond the English language boundary is no less important than familiarity with the recent, comprehensive research activity in the English language area. It also offers a survey of the present state of the art (from empirical to analytical accounting and from such esoteric subjects as gender issues to the archaeology of accounting); finally, it casts a glance into the future.

One of the outstanding accounting theoreticians of the twentieth century, Carl Thomas Devine exhibited a breadth and depth of knowledge few in the field of accounting have equalled. This book collects together eight previously unpublished essays on accounting theory written by Professor Devine.Professor Devine passed away in 1998, prior to the significant scandals that have plagued accounting and business since the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen. Many of the essays collected here are particularly important given these events. The first three essays are devoted to ethics and provide profound insights into the importance of a profession's ethical presuppositions. The book then presents essays, which provide a critical examination of the relevance of hermeneutics and deconstruction to an understanding of accounting practice and an analysis of the academic 'game' particularly with respect to Professor Devine's experiences in the Florida university system. The final essay in the volume is devoted to a critique of rational choice theory applications in accounting. Revisiting and building upon themes developed in earlier work, this collection of essays will be essential reading for accounting historians, accounting theoreticians and all those interested in the work of Carl Thomas Devine.

The rise of the British accountancy profession from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and the world-wide success of its accountancy firms, were to a large extent based on the growth of the audit function.This book explores the history of the audit process in Britain, demonstrating that the characteristic features of the auditing industry are a diversity in practice based largely on the different types of clients the auditors serve. The book examines the innovation that was brought about by the staggering developments in information technology which have been seen over the last few centuries.This comprehensive history will be a useful reference tool for accounting, business and economic historians and will also be an enlightening read for all those with an interest in auditing procedures.

With the collapse of Enron and other similar scandals, financial reporting and its relation to corporate governance has become a contentious issue. In this revealing book, author Paul Rosenfield involves the reader in exploring contemporary financial reporting and skilfully highlights the deficiencies in current methods. In doing so it provides a user-oriented guide to the salient issues which affect all aspects of financial accounting. Contemporary Issues in Financial Reporting challenges the reader to critically think through the issues and arguments involved in the practice of financial reporting. It goes to the heart of the most difficult and controversial problems, investigating the major issues and commenting upon the solutions offered in financial reporting literature. The grave defects in current accepted accounting principles are demonstrated and exposed, and alternative solutions are offered.Written by a former Secretary General of the International Accounting Standards Committee, practitioners and accounting scholars alike will find this volume to be an essential addition to their libraries.

The United Dutch East India Company was the first public company, preceding the formation of the English East-India Company by over 40 years. Its fame as the first public company which heralded the transition from feudalism to modern capitalism and its remarkable financial success for nearly two centuries ensure its importance in the history of capitalism. Although a publicly owned, highly complex and diversified business, and commonly agreed to be the largest and most profitable business in the 17th century, throughout its existence the Dutch East-India Company never produced public accounts of its financial affairs which would have allowed investors to judge the performance of the Company. Its financial accounting, which changed little during its lifetime, was not designed as an aid to rational investment decision-making by communicating the Company’s financial performance but to be a means of promoting sound stewardship by senior management. This study examines the contributions of accounting to the remarkable success of the Dutch East-India Company and the influences on these accounting practices. From the time that the German economic historian Werner Sombart proposed that accounting techniques, most especially double-entry bookkeeping, were critical to the development of modern capitalism and the public company, historians and accounting scholars have debated the extent and importance of these contributions. The Dutch East-India Company was a capitalistic enterprise that had a public, permanent capital and its principal objective was to continually increase profit by reinvesting its returns in the business. Rather than the organisation and management of the Dutch East-India Company reflecting the perceived benefits of a particular bookkeeping method, the supremacy that it achieved and maintained in a very hazardous business at a time of recurring conflict between European states was a consequence of the practicalities of 17th century business and The Netherlands’ unique, threatening natural environment which shaped its social and political institutions.

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, Scandinavia, Russia, Poland and the Ukraine as well as Argentina and Japan. In a time of financial globalization, familiarity with accounting research in countries beyond the English language boundary is no less important than familiarity with the recent, comprehensive research activity in the English language area. It also offers a survey of the present state of the art (from empirical to analytical accounting and from such esoteric subjects as gender issues to the archaeology of accounting); finally, it casts a glance into the future.

With the collapse of Enron and other similar scandals, financial reporting and its relation to corporate governance has become a contentious issue. In this revealing book, author Paul Rosenfield involves the reader in exploring contemporary financial reporting and skilfully highlights the deficiencies in current methods. In doing so it provides a user-oriented guide to the salient issues which affect all aspects of financial accounting. Contemporary Issues in Financial Reporting challenges the reader to critically think through the issues and arguments involved in the practice of financial reporting. It goes to the heart of the most difficult and controversial problems, investigating the major issues and commenting upon the solutions offered in financial reporting literature. The grave defects in current accepted accounting principles are demonstrated and exposed, and alternative solutions are offered.Written by a former Secretary General of the International Accounting Standards Committee, practitioners and accounting scholars alike will find this volume to be an essential addition to their libraries.

This book discusses and summarizes the revived interest in reality issues (ontology) within accounting, economics, and the information sciences, with a view to informing scholars from these different disciplines about each other’s endeavours in ontological research. Even more importantly, the book aims at familiarizing scholars from various disciplines with an evolutionary approach for examining questions about reality in the social sciences. The book is based on a partly pluralistic approach that assures unity in diversity. Unity, because all existence arises from physical reality; diversity, because emergent properties create biological and social realities that cannot be reduced to physical phenomena. Hence, the book recognizes not only concrete but also abstract entities. It shows, however, that the actualization of these abstract entities requires objectification and concrete manifestation. This pluralistic approach is central to this book. It also is a challenge to those who reject abstract entities as socially real, as well as to those who defend a non-realist position. The major task of this book is to explore proposals towards a uniform ontological basis. This uniform and universal presentation extends beyond traditional ontology (asking ‘what is real?’) to such questions as ‘on which reality level is something real?’ and ‘in which (temporal and modal) way is it real?’. Such an extended analysis) is relevant to accountants, economists, information scientists, other social scientists as well as philosophers.

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.

First published in 1996. The relationship between the present discounted value of future cash flows and discounted excess earnings should be viewed as a mathematical property of a double-entry book[1]keeping system based on clean surplus. The purpose of this anthology is to facilitate future research by highlighting these historical developments and by showing how more recent theoretical and empirical research fits into the earlier history. The book is divided into four sections: historical overview; analytical properties of clean surplus; the theory of the clean surplus equation; and empirical implications.

First published in 1996. This book summarises the Seminar held in Edinburgh in 1994 in the five hundredth year since the publication of Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita. Its purpose is simple but relevant to every accountant. It revisits some fundamentals that lay behind Pacioli's decision to write his Summa, and examines whether the accounting framework in which we work today has overlooked basic issues because of its continued focus on development of the existing financial accounting model. It analyses Pacioli's legacy from several different perspectives, deliberately choosing to do so in ways that addressed considerations that his work reflected, examining the nature and characteristics of the bridge between academic analysis and insight on the one hand and practical application on the other. It also looks at the dominant influences in the evolution of accountancy for managing stewardship and for reporting of that stewardship. By doing so, it attempts to identify influences that had been less pressing and so had been ignored or overlooked, and also considers how changing technology has affected the way we manage the accountancy process.

First Published in 1997. This book documents a highly significant development in the history of costing practice in the UK - the uniform costing system designed for the members of the British Federation of Master Printers (BFMP) during the early twentieth century.

This monograph is concerned with individual, though related, aspects and economic implications of historic cost (HC) accounting indices. The conceptual basis of the model that is advocated as a yardstick for assessing such implications, including potential corporate financial policy consequences, namely, a multiperiod cash flow-market value (CF-MV) model, is elaborated and evaluated at some length.

First published in 1997. This volume is a collection of studies that look at the ‘conceptual framework’ undertaken initially for the UK’s Accounting Standards Committee (‘ASC’), and to consider how far the views expressed in them have stood the test of time as standard setters around the world have followed in the FASB’s footsteps.