The way of organizing accounting did not interest many researchers in accounting. The article tries to fill this gap. It puts forward the transition from the bookkeeper to the accountant by the exploration of twelve European novels of the 19th and 20th century. This is not only a change of words...

The purpose of this article is to study accounting valuation practices in French bankruptcies following enactment of the Law of 1838. The research is based on a study of 500 files in the archives of the Paris Court of Commerce. After first presenting the main steps in the bankruptcy proceedings,...

This article is about the use of past in the successive present. In a first part, we try to define the various related concepts (history, memory, historiography) to show the problematic they could entail for management science. The second part is an example of the first one: it is about the use...

A partir d'archives d'entreprises, de manuels comptables, de coupures de presse spécialisée, d'archives d'associations et de thèses de droit anciennes, cette monographie revient sur l'histoire des entreprises, qui s'organisent aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles sans fonction comptable. Elle analyse...

Many researchers in management or in history of management often work on best sellers whereas the interest of such books could seem limited. This article tries to explain the reasons of the success. We have studied the historical case of the book of Eugène Léautey and Adolphe Guilbault, La...

What a change from the men trusted as bookkeepers in the 18th century to the very competent but supervised accountants of the 1920s! The 19th-century industrial revolution had taken place, but it would be a mistake to set this change down to purely economic reasons. As companies grew in size,...

When did the word comptabilité (accounting) appeared ? Which have been its different meanings? Those are the two questions addressed here. Drawing from accounting text- books and dictionaries, we try to describe and explain the emergence of the word after 1750, the competition with tenue des...