Points out that traditional conceptions of accounting history and its achievements are being challenged by new accounting historians who are informed by radical philosophies and approaches to history. Suggests that this is a belated reflection of movements within the wider discipline of history...

Traditional history has sought to provide narrative accounts of the past which can be accepted as factual, devoid of fictions and therefore true. This image has come under strong attack from new historians who denounce the narrative as a literary convention which mixes fiction (myth) and fact...

The introduction of efficiency auditing in Australian Commonwealth state audit created a level of stress and threat for the Auditor‐General never previously encountered. Using insights from processual analysis as developed by Turner to demonstrate the pressures on state audit, the paper...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to establish the importance of accounting in the management of Spanish military hospitals by the St John’s Order (SJO) of the Roman Catholic Church in the eighteenth century, a time of crisis between the Church and the State. The sacred mission of the...

Purpose – The paper aims to extend research which has sought to explain Britain's early success as an industrial power by identifying the influence of religious doctrine of the Dissenting Protestant churches on the development of accounting practices in the factory. The concern is not with...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contest Edwards et al. ’s (2002) findings that resistance to the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and the form that it took when implemented by the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of ideological conflict...

Purpose – This paper examines the nature and function of cost accounting at the Newcastle Infirmary, a large voluntary provincial hospital, established in 1751. In particular, the paper adds to the literature on accounting within early voluntary hospitals by identifying the relative...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the role played by accounting in managing an early nineteenth century lunatic asylum in Palermo, Italy. Design/methodology/approach The paper is informed by Foucault’s studies of lunatic asylums and his work on governmentality which gave...