Reviewed by Ross E. Stewart Seattle Pacific University

In the last fifteen years new understandings of accounting have emerged because the study of accounting has been contextualized within the broad spectrum of the human sciences. This broader perspective has brought a new vitality to accounting research and has enriched our understanding of accounting practice. Accounting research has emerged from being almost exclusively wedded to financial economics and psychology to being more completely interdisciplinary. Organizational theory, sociology, political theory, anthropology, history, philosophy, linguistic theory, communication theory, theology, critical theory, etc., have contributed to this enriched understanding of accounting. Accounting practice is no longer seen as a neutral, benign technology reporting the facts of organizational life. Rather accounting practice is interested, problematic, and shapes the context in which it operates.

Hopwood and Miller have collected together in this book a representative sample of work that illustrates this view of accounting research and practice. The editors have taken work primarily published in Accounting, Organizations and Society and have had the authors condense, rewrite their articles or synthesize two or more articles into one, for a broader audience. Indeed the goal of the series that this book is published in, Cambridge Studies in Management, is to take specialized academic work and make it accessible for a broader audience. The papers are written by academics who come out of a British research tradition, and the contexts of analysis are primarily British except for Thompson, Hoskin and Macve (a U.S. context) and Miller and O’Leary (a U.S. context).

What is interesting for readers of The Accounting Historians Journal is that the papers are primarily historical analyses of accounting. They are historical analyses which explore the actual consequences of accounting rather than its stated rationales, and they explore the social and institutional bases of accounting rather than presuming a purely technical or economic autonomy for accounting. Accounting intersects with concerns such as national and organizational efficiency, industrial productivity, organizational rationality and professionalization. The result is studies that examine “the conditions, capacities and consequences of accounting” [Miner, p. 5].

Thompson (Ch. 2) and Hoskin and Macve (Ch. 3) both give an account of the rise of double entry bookkeeping (DEB). Thompson’s analysis is informed by rhetoric and the institutions of the church, pedagogic apparatuses and the publishing house. Hoskin and Macve describe DEB as part of the changes in information technologies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Their analysis does not dwell on the technique of DEB per se but rather sees the emergence of the technique as part of broader societal and institutional changes. Hoskin and Macve use Foucault’s knowledgepower schema to further describe how accounting is a disciplinary device. Their analysis links the genesis of accounting’s modem power to the educational technology of the examination and to institutions such as West Point Military Academy.

Miller and O’Leary (Ch. 4) give a Foucaultinspired analysis of standard costing as a “technology of government.” They make connections to the scientific management movement and show how accounting calculations became part of the discourse on the “efficiency” of individuals, organizations and the State. Standard costing caught the individual in a web of calculative norms and standards which enabled a program of government. “Between the worker and the boss was interposed a calculative apparatus that claimed neutrality and objectivity” [p. 112]. Bougen (Ch. 6) uses Foucault’s concept of “regimes of truth” in a similar way in a historical case study of accounting in the Remold Company. He suggests that managerial regimes of truth are powerful because of “their capacity to demonstrate that certain organizational arrangements are beyond contention” [p. 139].

Loft’s essay (Ch. 5) and the Copper et. al. paper (Ch. 11) address professionalization issues and the role of the state. Loft’s essay addresses the professionalization of cost accountants and the emergence of cost accounting in the United Kingdom during the 1910s and 1920s. National efficiency is mentioned as a reason for the importance of cost systems, as is the efficient use of labor. Similar insights are given by Tomlinson (Ch. 7) in his analysis of labor productivity. He mentions the importance of cost accounting systems and in particular standard costing and budgeting as being part of a broader discourse on productivity measurement. National efficiency themes are also explored in McSweeney’s essay (Ch. 10) on the Financial Management Initiative launched in 1982 in the U.K. by the Thatcher government and in Armstrong’s paper (Ch. 8) on the intersection of management accounting and industrial relations in the U.K. from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Power (Ch. 12) gives an insightful analysis of the way auditing has become a generalizable social practice in the U.K.. He describes the audit society as one where “newly perceived dangers can be ritually purified and reconciled to existing managerial and economic practice” [p. 313]. Power describes the paradoxical nature of auditing. Audit technologies have become part of the managerial discourse of performance, quality, accountability and governance. Yet “the performance of audit itself is far from being unambiguous and free from public dispute” [p. 313].

Hopwood et. al. (Ch. 9) describe the emergence and decline of the valueadded statement in the U.K.. This paper in many ways is paradigmatic of the other papers in this book. The authors point out the ambiguous nature of valueadded and describe three arenas in which the value added discourse took place. The authors chart the shifting patterns of relations between agencies such as the government, trade unions, the accounting profession and the changing nature of ihese institution’s concerns within the three arenas of accounting standards, macroeconomic management, and industrial relations and information disclosure. The authors describe this complex interplay as an accounting constellation in which a network of particular practices, processes and institutions “governed how valueadded might function as a calculative, administrative and discursive practice” [p. 225]. The decline of interest in valueadded occurred because “the arenas out of which it emerged had been subject to significant discontinuities … Devoid of its specific social condition of possibility, valueadded was little more than a mere technical accounting possibility” fp. 231]. Accounting is shown to both shape and facilitate the contexts in which it operates. It has no essential role or function in society, and its consequences can be unintended. Accounting emerges in a multiple of fields.

The papers are introduced by Miller (Ch. 1) in an essay that gives a broad perspective on this literature and enables the reader to contextualize the papers in the book. He suggests that the study of accounting as a social and institutional practice is in its early stages, and he offers a future agenda for accounting research in this area. This book is a welcome addition to the literature. It would be excellent assigned reading for upper division undergraduate majors, as well as for graduate students. It would also be useful for researchers outside of the accounting discipline to gain an understanding of the increasing significance of accounting in society. This book demonstrates that accounting is increasingly one of the most influential bodies of expertise in the United Kingdom. It would be interesting to see whether a similar body of work can be collected together in another national context with the same conclusion.