Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges faced by an Australian accounting academic, R. J. Chambers, in the 1950s, in breaking into the accounting research community, at that time, almost entirely located in the USA and the UK. For academics outside the networks of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to revisit the special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal published in 1996 on the theme “Accounting history into the twenty-first century”, in order to identify and assess the impact of the special issue in shaping developments in...

Accounting historians have long recognised accounting’s international scope but have typically concentrated their research endeavours on region- or country-specific studies, or on investigating the diffusion of accounting ideas, techniques and institutions from one country to others. Much...

The "new" accounting historians that emerged from the mid-1980s characterised their predecessors as relying heavily on a view of accounting as progressive and accounting change as evolutionary. From a social science perspective, progress is a problematic concept, as it implies not just change...

Over the past three decades, a desire to understand the processes of change within accounting, and the contribution made by accounting to broader societal and organizational change, has stimulated a substantial body of historical research in accounting. Labelled as the “new accounting...

Society's perception of the legitimacy of the accounting profession and its members is grounded in the verbal and visual images of accountants that are projected not only by accountants themselves but also by the media. The paper uses the critical literature on stereotypes to examine how books...