Ciarán Ó hÓgartaigh DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY BUSINESS SCHOOL,
Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh ST. PATRICK’S COLLEGE, DRUMCONDRA

and

Ingrid Jeacle UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

“HOW IT ESSENTIALLY WAS”: TRUTH CLAIMS IN HISTORY AND ACCOUNTING

Abstract: This paper compares and contrasts the conceptualization of “profession” in history and accounting. Professional history and, to a more limited extent, professional accounting have their 19th century origins in notions of scientific method and objectivity as well as in motives of “closure” and exclusivity. The paper argues that these “sci-entific” origins of both history and accounting rendered them exclusive not only in membership but in methodology. As scientific approaches relied on documentary evidence, various rich, if less reliable, sources of evidence were excluded. This resulted in the representation of a limited and flawed “reality” in both history and accounting which led to 20th century threats to their legitimacy. The paper concludes that exploration of the interfaces between history and accounting offers new perspectives on both disciplines as we enter the 21st century.

INTRODUCTION

The 20th century was a period of significant change in ac-counting. Early decades witnessed the growing strength of a newly-established profession of accountants. In time, this pro-fessionalization became firmly entrenched with the advent of various accounting regulatory bodies supported by company legislation. The lowly bookkeeper emerged as a powerful controller [Hopwood, 1994]. To gain deeper insights into new
Acknowledgments: The comments and suggestions of two anonymous re-viewers are gratefully acknowledged.

practices, accounting researchers responded by tailoring their methodological approach and surveying their fields of inquiry from broader perspectives. The importance of historical context increasingly emerged as a key issue of late 20th century accounting research. Whilst historical accounting research is not a new phenomenon, it became infused in recent decades with a wider conception of the social world in which accounting operates. “Genealogies of calculation” [Miller and Napier, 1993] emerged to enrich our understanding of the accounting craft.

Consistent with this broader conception, accounting itself has been variously described as cartography [Solomons, 1978], science [Chambers, 1964], social science [Mautz, 1963 and Lehman, 1990] and behavioral science [Lee, 1973]. These characterizations of accounting originate in conceptualizations of accounting ranging from its objectivity and neutrality (in charting the landscape and measuring the attributes of the reporting entity) to its formation by, and effects on, society. Past transactions and events are the common coinage of history and accounting. Accounting defines its essential elements, assets and liabilities, as future benefits based on past transactions and events and values assets at depreciated historical cost (or revalued amount). Reflecting accounting’s foundation in historical cost and many other striking parallels between history1 and accounting, this paper explores the linkages between history and accounting by comparing and contrasting the conceptualization of profession in both history and accounting.

Important links between research in history and accounting history have been considered by, for example, Fleischman, Mills and Tyson [1996], Funnell [1996], Parker [1998] and Oldroyd [1999]. By placing accounting in the context of the discipline of history, the present paper contributes fresh insights into the development and nature of both history and accounting as professions. The paper argues that there are many similarities in the methodological development of history and accounting. Although these developments are not necessarily contemporaneous, both history and accounting gained legitimacy as professions partly through their adoption of apparently scientific

1 The term ‘history’ is ambiguous in English and many other languages, meaning — on the one hand — res gestae or the course of human events and — on the other — historia rerum gestarum or the reports of those human events rendered by historians. Throughout this paper, the term ‘history’ is used in the latter sense.

attire. By doing so, they excluded elements of the world which did not meet standards of evidence and objectivity. Hence, their strength — their apparent objectivity — is also a weakness: their inability and/or unwillingness to embrace as evidence more intangible elements of the world they attempt to represent. These limited perspectives in history and accounting left areas where history and accounting would not go — areas which were inevitably explored and populated by other disciplines and other sources of information.

The paper is in four main sections. The first section sets out the 19th century conceptualizations of accounting and history as professions. It reflects on the origins of scientific approaches to historiography which characterized the early professional claims of historians. Similar claims regarding accountants, particularly in the US, in the 19th and early 20th centuries are explored. The second section argues that, while the rhetoric of these scientific claims strengthened both professions’ early credibility, they also limited their perspectives of the world to representations which could be supported by “reliable evidence” such as documents and transactions. As criticism of the exclusive nature of professions emerged, history and accounting, being exclusive in both membership and method, were inevitably undermined.

Drawing on the first two sections, the third section evalu-ates the emergence of truth claims in both history and accounting in the light of perceptions of the subjectivity of science. The paper concludes by exploring the potential of the perspective adopted in extending our understanding of history and accounting and our appreciation of the opportunities each offers to the other.

THE ORIGINS OF PROFESSIONAL HISTORY AND THE PROFESSION OF ACCOUNTING

The characterization of both history and accounting as professions emerged in the 19th century. As a response to infringements by others (such as literature scholars, partisan historians and philosophers) onto the territory of history, the 19th century German historian, von Ranke, distinguished history from philosophy and literature. Von Ranke argued that “to history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages” [in Stern, 1953, p. 57]. This notion of history as a profession was further propagated in the late 19th century by the education of several prominent turn

40 Accounting Historians Journal, June 2002
of the 20th century Anglo-American historians, such as John W. Burgess [see Brown, 1951]. Journals such as Historische Zeitschift (founded in 1859), Revue Historique (1876), Rivista Storica Italiana (1884), the English Historical Review (1886) and the American Historical Review (1895) promulgated “new methods of scientific scholarship” [Iggers, 1997, p. 27]. While history and historiography undoubtedly have a long history, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries historians were increasingly conceptualized “as a professional group with its own code and rituals that governed how the members related to each other, to outsiders, to reality and to what it valued most” [Parker, 1979a, p. 193], leading Bury [1903, p. 7] to declare that “history is a science, no less and no more”.
The conceptualization of history as science was not uncon-tested (see Ausubel [1950] and Black [1965]). Neither did it necessarily claim that its process of explanation was identical to that of the natural sciences but that it is, as defined by Kuhn [1970, p. 167], “a community of experts bound together by rigorously defined questions and highly technical methods”. The scientific nature of history was one of method, of handling and interpreting evidence rather than that of cause and effect: “the collection of facts, the weighing of evidence as to what events happened, are in some sense scientific; but not so the discovery of the causes and effects of these events” [Trevelyan, 1930-34, p. 48].

Similarly, early representations of accounting attempted “to lift accounting and audit practices beyond the status of craft knowledge and to connect them with relatively established forms of scientific thinking” [Power, 1994, p. 5]. It was the practice of both accounting and history — rather than the outcome — that was draped in scientific attire. The science was in the search, in the process rather than in the product, of history and accounting: “when we speak of accounting … as a science, we are referring to its method” [Spencer, 1963, p. 310].

Further, while accounting, like history, has been practiced over a long period — a longevity which was used to legitimize its status [Carnegie and Napier, 1996, p. 11] — the accounting profession in the US, in Scotland, England and Wales and in Ireland as well as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand also emerged as a profession in the 19th century. This was undoubtedly part of the professionalization movement of the period but also a response to the changing environment of the time [Walker, 1995] and to the encroachment of others on the accounting (or bookkeeping) fields [Walker, 1991]. Johnson and Kaplan [1987] and McWatters [1995] suggest that this period also marked the emergence of management accounting information in the wake of technological advances, intensified competition [McWatters, 1995, p. 197] and “great advances in transportation and communication” [Johnson and Kaplan, 1987, p. 8]. Growing as a profession, historians (such as von Ranke and Trevelyan) distinguished between “the chronicler and the historian” [Evans, 1997, p. 25], and accountants between the bookkeeper or clerk (or, more recently, the accounting technician) and the accountant [Abbott, 1988; Kirkham and Loft, 1993].

Saks [1983, p. 1] discusses the “shifting and diverse range of theoretical frameworks” through which the emergence and expansion of the professions in the late 19th century have been examined. This section explores these frameworks as they relate to the emergence of professions generally. The importance of the social and economic context, education, professional qualification and techniques to the legitimization of professions are discussed. The paper then draws on these characterizations of professions to examine common characteristics of history and accounting as professions.

The emergence of the 19th century concept of profession: Both history and accounting became institutionalized and structured through church and government and differentiated themselves — like many other intellectual disciplines — “from a primary religious matrix” [Parsons, 1968, p. 537]. For example, monks had a long tradition of keeping annals while religious organizations and city states maintained records of institutional wealth, consistent with early characterizations of accounting as assisting in the stewardship function. In history, “from Thucydides to von Ranke, the key institution which gave unity to society and provided the thread of historical narrative was the state” [Iggers, 1979, p. 1]. Early historians “lived in a largely illiterate world and in their concern for writing they constituted an élite within an élite . . . For them public affairs were predominantly, almost exclusively, the only thing that mattered” [Hay, 1977, p. 7].
Population growth, urbanization and an increasingly afflu-ent society provided the conditions for the growth of the professions in the mid to late 19th century. Increasing technology, as well as scientific developments, increased the demand for engineers, accountants and medical practitioners. The development of the railways, for example, made the need for careful engineering and accounting procedures all the more acute [Gourvish, 1988]. Perkin [1996] has noted that the move from “agriculture to industry to services” facilitated the growth of the professions. Additionally, a degree of “specialisation leads directly to professionalism” [ibid., 1996, p. 22] — and/or vice versa: “with professionalism has come specialisation” [Porter, 1995, p. 14].

This late 19th century concern for standardization and specification was preceded by the emergence of quantitative as opposed to qualitative measures of weight and distance in the late 18th century, explained by Kula [1986, p. 21], as the imposition of both “metrological and juridical equality” in a barter-based society. Furthermore, as Thompson [1988, p. 38] suggests, this period saw a “transition from an aristocracy of landowners not to a democracy but to an aristocracy of business and professional talents”. Professions sought to control the supply of entrants. Once this was achieved, they asserted their sole right to practice a particular skill.

This tradition of exclusivity relates, in part, to the development of the professions for “gentlemen”, in other words, those who did not work with their hands. Walker [1991] suggests that this gentlemanly idea of profession characterized professional formation in 19th century Britain. Such gentlemanly aspirations also partly explain why surgery was originally thought inappropriate for gentlemen. Originally, too, a physician was precluded from “performing physical examinations” [Parsons, 1968, p. 541]. This idea is put to humorous effect by Alan Bennett [Bennett, 1992] in his play, The Madness of George III, when the king’s physician categorically refused to examine his patient.

The desire to distance the professional from its subject was also true in the quest for quantification in accounting. Quantification has strong cognitive consequences which distance the reader from the process and product of accounting. As Porter [1995] points out, quantification established a distance between the reader and the object being quantified: “In a written form, discourse is less tied to the immediate context of persons, time and place” [Goody, 1986, pp. 53-54]. This paralleled the increasingly complex and impersonal relationships of the business environment from the mercantile capitalism of the 15th century to the industrial capitalism of the 19th century, a process of change which “involved a shift from particular and personalistic audiences (e.g. a business partner) to general and institutionalized audiences (e.g. a market)” [Carruthers and Espeland, 1991, p. 47].

Such conditions provided fertile ground for the develop-ment of accounting in particular. They led not only to an in-creased demand for services but allowed professional organiza-

6 hÓgartaigh, Ó hÓgartaigh and Jeacle: Truth Claims 43
tions to shape and, ultimately, control the means by which these services would be supplied. Professions “compete in the societal market for income, power and status” [Perkin, 1996, p. 4]. They must also prove that their service is “indispensable”. If they manage to do this, the professions’ status was raised and, by extension, the “psychic rewards (deference and self respect)” [ibid.] which many occupations sought. In the quest for legitimacy, therefore, professions needed to establish thresholds and rules which controlled entry into the profession and patrolled its practice.

The increasingly scientistic nature of professionalization, with its emphasis on the standardization of training and entry, contributed further to the exclusivity and elevation of profes-sions. This was particularly evident in science where technological knowledge and lack of access to scientific education constituted a considerable barrier to entry (see, for example, Rossiter, 1982 and Phillips, 1990). Therefore, building a profession on “scientific” foundations raised the barriers to entry and added to the mystique of the professional technique. Professions promoted their own privilege through the rhetoric of educational qualification and “scientific” method. Indeed, the professionalization of medicine was directly related to scientific developments. With an increasing focus on “scientifically based standards of competence” [Perkin, 1996, p. 14], the concept of a trained-professional became the desirable norm.
The focus on training meant that, to a certain degree, “ca-reers came to be open to talents; the hereditary basis was no longer legitimised” [Parsons, 1968, p. 545]. However, inequalities undoubtedly remained. Some professionals, such as solicitors and accountants, required future members to serve an apprenticeship. This, as the Commission on Vocational Organisation in Ireland [Commission on Vocational Organisation, p. 355] pointed out, excluded the “poor boy”. The “poor girl” was not even mentioned. As Kirkham and Loft [1993, p. 510] comment “the professional accountant was not only socially superior and less numerous than the clerk, he was a man and the mere clerk was increasingly a woman.” Similar distinctions between the “professional” (male) historian and the “amateur” (female) are described by Smith [1998] in the context of the emerging professionalization of history.

The emphasis on qualifications is closely linked to the sta-tus of the profession. With the emphasis on qualifications and also on apprenticeship, entry to the profession was restricted to those with education and influence. These two attributes of education and influence were closely linked where schools ex-isted “to prepare children for a place in society which their parentage determined with more or less certainty” [Dore, 1976, p. 16] — a “class stratification” which sharpened in 19th century Europe [Iggers, 1975, p. 46]. Credentials were therefore used to reinforce the monopolizing tendencies of professions and perpetuate their class traditions. The poet W.B. Yeats [cited in Perkin, 1996, p. 390] referred to “the despotic rule of the educated class”. It was this class which dominated the professions.

The cachet of credentials was part of the development of professionals. Educational hurdles were raised as the available pool of talent widened, evolving inexorably to the tendency that university attendance became increasingly the norm in professional education: Dore [1976, passim] diagnoses this as “the diploma disease”.

This foundation of university education was especially true of professional history. The university was where “members of the profession were trained” [Evans, 1997, p. 20]. It “evolved from a nursery of dogma into a laboratory of scientific truth” [Novick, 1988, p. 33].

The university also acted as “the gatekeeper to the career hierarchies” [Perkin, 1996, p. 395]. In the continental context, the university was “organised about the four faculties of theol-ogy, philosophy, law, and medicine” while the English system was “generally nonspecialised” [Parsons, 1968, p. 539]. In this characterization of the professional context, the nexus of professional accounting development — as “an ‘applied’ branch of the professions”, having a “social primacy” — was situated outside the university. History, having a “cultural primacy”, had its roots in the medieval university [Parsons, 1968, p. 537].
American accountants “perceived themselves as practical implementors of the science of accounts” [McMillan, 1999, p. 8], – though the notion of accounting as science was later chal-lenged by, for example, May [1943] and Ross [1966]. While a university education also comprised part of the rites of passage to membership of the accounting profession in the US — which emphasized its scientism and credentialism earlier than elsewhere [McMillan, 1999] — such scientistic privileging was less central to the emergence of the accounting profession in other countries. For example, Walker [1995] concludes that professional accounting organizations in Scotland such as the Society of Accountants in Edinburgh (SAE) and the Institute of Accountants and Actuaries in Glasgow (IAAG) had their genesis in political and institutional conflict and structural economic change.

6 hÓgartaigh, Ó hÓgartaigh and Jeacle: Truth Claims 45
Nonetheless, qualifications and credentialism became an impor-tant part of their quest for legitimacy: “Once the challenge to their dominance in the market for the provision of insolvency services had been repelled, and on the acquisition of Royal Charters, the SAE and IAAG began to assume the persona of qualifying associations by the establishment of structures for the testing of professional knowledge in 1885 … and by operating closure strategies based primarily on credentialism” [ibid., pp. 306-307].
Hence, while history and accounting had distinct roots, like many other professions, both drew sustenance from scientific credentials as a means of propagating and protecting their growth. As the next section outlines, while there are parallels between the history of history and the history of accounting, there are further, deeper similarities to be found in the nature of the accounting and historical functions.

THE NATURE OF ACCOUNTING AND HISTORY

Documents are the historian’s raw material. The increasing confidence in science in the late 19th century provided histori-ans with the motivation to study such documents as if they were insects under a microscope. The drive towards greater pro-fessionalization in this period can be perceived as part of the tendency to establish, beyond reproach, the importance of certain occupations in the successful management of the machinery of state. The professional ideal echoed the Victorian emphasis on efficiency. The desire for state efficiency played into the hands of professionals. Doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers were needed to develop the newly efficient state.

The growth in literacy during the 19th century gave history and accounting a readership hitherto unable to unlock their meanings. Once more, this rendered their development similar to each other but different to some other professions such as engineering and medicine. Medics, for example, seek out and diagnose disease. Engineers construct tangible, physical struc-tures. The truth claims of history and accounting depended on less concrete realities and, as a result, their practitioners rested those claims on more ostensibly tangible, documentary founda-tions.

The professionalization of history meant that “history was now pursued less by people in public life . . . than by a group of technically trained scholars who increasingly wrote more for a scholarly audience than an educated public” [Iggers, 1975, p. 2]. Both history and accounting were sciences of the articulate,
discourses of the literate and, in the case of accounting, the numerate. Given the representational, written nature of ac-counting, however, it, like history, also depended on the growth of literacy not only for the supply of its members but for the demand of its clientele.

The written, published produce of both professions added to their truth claims and the rhetoric of reality — the mere writing of something made it appear to be more “true” [Ong, 1986]. Carruthers and Espeland [1991, p. 56] argue that “in a written form, meanings appear more “fixed”, relative to oral forms . . . When the text is an account, this presumption of a fixed “meaning” amounts to a belief in an objective economic reality that can be accurately represented and measured”. They also suggest that double entry bookkeeping portrayed a scien-tific process, a “rhetoric of economic rationality” [p. 31]. As Carnegie [1997, p. 243] suggests, “double entry accounting, as a mystery to the laity, also served to mark off the accounting profession from other professional groups”.
Solomons’ [1978] and Chambers’ [1967] descriptions of accounting as cartography and science respectively appeal to its neutrality, what has been described in history as “Wie es eigentlich gewesen” (how it essentially was) [von Ranke, 1973, p. 119]. However, this characterization of history has more recently been translated to mean not only what actually happened but an attempt to understand “the inner being of the past” [Evans, 1997, p. 17], echoing accountants’ attempts to portray the “substance of transactions” [Accounting Standards Board, 1994]. The Accountants’ Handbook’s definition of objectivity in accounting as “the expression of facts without distortion from personal bias” [Arnett, 1961, p. 65] and other contemporaneous characterizations of accounting as invulnerable to “emotive considerations” [Burke, 1964, p. 842] are Rankean in their rhetoric. History is “congealed interpretation” [Jenkins, 1991, p. 44], accounting is “interpretation and simplification” [Littleton and Zimmerman, 1962, p. 21].

Professional judgment is at the heart of such interpretation of (in the cases of both history and accounting) historical and (in the case of accounting and, in some respects, history) eco-nomic events. Both history and accounting build pictures of a less tangible reality, the picture itself being, on the one hand, a product of the historian’s and the accountant’s personal and professional paradigm and shaped, on the other, by the inter-pretation of the reader. Accounting and historical interpreta-tions are neither right nor wrong but generally agreed upon, in accordance with convention. In both, objectivity is attained through adherence to conventions validated and empowered by consensus. This has led to the emergence of the “professional historian” and the “professional accountant”, having the conventional characteristics of a profession, such as a particular training and route to entry, a conceptual emphasis and an identity which the profession protects. However, the adoption of professional and scientific methods, while painting an aura of neutrality also neutralizes personal judgment. The power of the profession becomes “not power plus legitimacy, but power minus discretion” [Barnes, 1986, p. 194].

In the US, late 19th century conceptualizations of accounting as “the mathematical science of values” [Sprague, 1889, p. 123] suggested that it was “a means to reveal reality that would otherwise remain hidden and lost in the business world” [McMillan, 1999, p. 26]. In other words, bookkeeping was a science whose principles revealed reality. This echoes Elton’s [1991] metaphor of the past as the drama behind the curtain waiting to be revealed and Evans’ [1997] image of the historian as the sculptor chiseling a granite block to reveal the truth which lies beneath. In doing so, however, both history and accounting interpret the evidence and report to the reader based on those interpretations, choosing to chisel in a particular direction and recognizing one element of reality over another. The dust discarded by the sculptor itself contains remnants of reality unrevealed and unrecorded, the sculpture itself lacking subtlety and depth. As Elton [1991, p. 7] points out with regard to the truth, “we know that we shall never see it all or see it in ways that prove totally convincing to everyone.”
This section has outlined the emergence of accounting as one of the “great agencies of quantitative impersonality” [Porter, 1994, p. 40] and the similar trends in the evolution and elevation of history in the 19th and early 20th centuries. However, the 20th century saw considerable change in social structures and intellectual attitudes. The following section discusses the potential erosion of the “output” of history and accounting in the light of uncertainty and the emergence of other sources of information.

HISTORY, ACCOUNTING AND THE SUBJECTIVITY OF SCIENCE

Evans [1997, p. 37] comments that a “reassertion of historical objectivity came at a time in the 1950s and 1960s when the historical profession was re-establishing itself, undergoing slow but steady growth, and recapturing the social and financial position it had enjoyed in the late nineteenth century”. Similarly in accounting, a number of papers dealing with objectivity and measurement in accounting were published in the early 1960s [Arnett, 1961; Burke, 1964; Chambers, 1964; Ijiri and Jeadicke, 1964]. “Neutrality”, it was argued, was the key prerequisite in dealing with historical and accounting evidence.

This sense of science in history and accounting then came under attack. The last two decades have seen a revolution in historiography as history attempts to portray a broader view of the past and as the hegemony of history as an explanation of the past and present is challenged by other disciplines. Canny [1998, p. 55] complains that “the property of the past has been taken over by people in other disciplines”: the questioning of history came from sociology, philosophy and literature and the emerging postmodernists therein [see, for example, White, 1973 and Iggers, 1999]. Ironically, these were some of the very groups from which von Ranke wished to distinguish historians more than a century earlier (and, furthermore, the neo-Weberian sociology which affected history in the 1960s first did so in Germany). As a result, “the old models of historical science, which dominated historical scholarship in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, have in recent decades been increasingly regarded as inadequate” [Iggers, 1979, p. 4].

Indeed, the increasing rigidity of the scientific approach alienated many. By the 20th century, a much broader interpretation of history was emerging amongst, for example, French historians of the Annales School who “wished to enlarge the dimensions of historical investigation” and those with Marxist perspectives who “dealt with the totality of society moving through time” [Parker, 1979b, p. 423]. Such developments are linked to the recognition that history, as language and text, is a product of its time, place and the historian him or her self [White, 1978]. Thus, “modern historical consciousness comprises two elements: an awareness of the disparity in circumstances and mentality which creates a gulf between all previous ages and our own, and a recognition that our world owes its distinctive character to the way it has grown out of those past circumstances and mentalities” [Tosh, 1991, pp. 14-15]. In order to broaden one’s range it is necessary to examine the history that lies beneath the past.

In the face of such change, Stone [1991, pp. 217-218] provocatively proclaimed that “history might be on the way to becoming an endangered species”, sentiments echoed in J.H.

Plumb’s [1970] The Death of the Past. Earlier, Stone [1965] had suggested that new history demanded more than sources alone as “social groups do not leave corporate records” [Tosh, 1991, p. 101]. History has, therefore, not maintained a narrow focus. Historians realize that many groups have been ignored in traditional historiography [Hobsbawm, 1997]. Marwick [1989, p. 134] remarks how an interest “in the symbolism of ordinary life has advanced unabated”. The growth in gender and ethnic history are but two examples of the desire to examine those who were often powerless in the past [Evans, 1997]. This approach argues that for too long history has been the preserve of an élite [Carr, 1987].

These historical pictures painted on a wider canvas also reflect the changes in historiography of the past two decades. The new focus provides a more extensive picture of the past. The emergence of social history necessitated a new perspective as, frequently, the “common people” left no documents behind. Social history, wrote Trevelyan [1944, p. vii], “might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out”. This history emphasized the individual as family member, worker and consumer in contrast to the history of “big men”, high politics and institutions.

Furthermore, the categorization of history as science or, alternatively, as belonging wholly in the humanities has been questioned by, for example, Tosh [1991] and Hobsbawm [1997]. As a branch of the humanities history is presented as a guardian of the past. An alternative view, that of social science, suggests that history cannot only be a depository of the past but that it can also (like economics and sociology) suggest solutions for the future. Moreover, a characterization as social science reshapes its processes and introduces a broader context to historical reflection.

This change in history has parallels in accounting history. Perhaps the most significant shift in the focus of inquiry of accounting history in recent years has been the emergence of a number of studies belonging to a prominent body of work commonly classified as the ‘new’ accounting history [Miller et al., 1991]. Miller et al. [1991] argue that this characterization of ‘the new accounting history’ is justified by the more prominent role which accounting history has played within the accounting discipline during recent years and the different focus and scope of this work to that which has been traditionally adopted in accounting history. A characteristic of this new approach is its interdisciplinary nature.

In marked contrast to the somewhat prescriptive statements on accounting history issued by the AAA’s Committee on Accounting History [1970], Miller et al. [1991] define no theoretical boundaries within which historical accounting research must be based, nor standard methodologies to which all research must be ascribed. Accounting history, they claim, should not be viewed simply as some natural evolution. The new accounting history sees accounting as being formed by many complex, diverse and changing issues over time [Miller et al. 1991, p. 396].

Crudely summarizing the transition within accounting history, similar to changes in the discipline of history itself, a shift has occurred away from the antiquarian approach of meticulous recording of dates and consecutive events, the construction of a rational evolution of technique on the path to economic progress and a descriptive, atheoretical narrative, to a broader contextual approach which recognizes discon-tinuities and partialities and seeks to embrace complexities in gaining a deeper insight into the role of the accounting craft. Postmodern thinking has proved to be illuminating in explor-ing the context of accounting change as reflected in the work of, for example, Loft [1986], Hoskin and Macve [1986 and 1988] and Miller and O’Leary [1987]. Furthermore, as in many “sub-fields” of history, postmodernism and specifically the work of Foucault has “been a critical force in moving certain of these subfields from the remote margins to the very centre of historians’ concerns” [Goldstein, 1994, p. 1]: “accounting history has moved closer to the centre of accounting research” [Oldroyd, 1999, p. 84].

The extension of the boundaries of accounting research has raised reactions amongst accounting academics similar to those recently experienced within the historical community. Tyson [1993 and 1995], critical of the theory driven approach of new accounting history, claims [1993, p. 5] it “may inspire studies that obscure the distinction between opinion, interpretation, and factual truth, or more simply, between philosophy and history”. Whittington [1995] suggests that accounting is in danger of becoming “too interesting”, reminiscent of Elton’s more vociferous comments regarding the “malevolent influences” of social science on history [Elton, 1986]. History needs “more kings and queens” and less of the “non-existent history of ethnic entities and women” [Elton, 1984, p. 18]. These “non-existent histories” are defined out of existence by historical methods themselves: they are deemed not to exist because they leave few documents behind which history defines as worthy of record. They exist in the same way as goodwill and human assets exist in the business environment: extant but “unreliable” and, therefore, in the guise of objectivity, unrecorded and unrecognized.

Conventional perspective of accounting practice also came to be questioned in the 1960s. In financial reporting, a number of corporate collapses exposed the limitations of accounting regulation while market-based accounting research, such as that of Ball and Brown [1967] and Beaver [1967] questioned the “usefulness” of accounting information to the users of financial statements. In management accounting, the work of Anthony and Dearden [1980] and, later, Hopwood [1983] undermined the one-dimensional use of numbers as measures of performance. Further developments in the 1980s (for example, Johnson and Kaplan, 1987) saw the emergence of deeper questions concerning the relevance of management accounting information.

The conceptualization of financial accounting also came under attack once more with further corporate collapses and evidence of “creative accounting” [Smith, 1996; Griffiths, 1987]. The acceptance that earnings per share as a single number does not capture the complexity of business performance led to the presentation of comprehensive income and the disaggregation of the reporting of profitability. In the US, Management Discussion and Analysis and, in the UK, the Operating and Financial Review reflect the increasing perception of the inadequacy of quantification alone by suggesting that the discussion accompanying the annual report “should contain analytical discussion rather than merely numerical analysis” [Accounting Standards Board, 1993]. In managerial accounting, Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard is based on “the premise that an exclusive reliance on financial measures in a management system is insufficient” [Kaplan and Norton, 2001, p. 87].

The increasing influence of sources of information other than those regulated through the annual report led to the regulation of information disseminated through other media (see, for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s fair trading regulations and efforts to regulate analyst commentary on the public media). The future role of accounting itself has been increasingly questioned in the US [see Institute of Management Accountants, 1994, 1995, 1999; Albrecht and Sack, 2000], in the UK [Beattie, 1999] and elsewhere. While the significant status of empirical accounting research continues to be reflected in major international journals such as The Accounting Review and The Journal of Accounting Research, some of this research raises important issues regarding the increasing inadequacy of contemporary accounting measurements (see, for example, Lev as interviewed in Stewart [2001, p. 187]).

Alongside Hopwood’s [1983] recognition of the need for detailed investigation of accounting’s organizational and social context, there was increasing advocacy of qualitative research methods as a rich alternative to the conventional scientific model. At the heart of the concerns raised during this period was a belief that academic accounting research was becoming more distant from accounting practice [Hopwood, 1983; Tomkins and Groves, 1983]. Adherence to a quantitative mode of scientific inquiry within the discipline was criticized for this past academic neglect [Hopper and Powell, 1985; Chua, 1986]. In contrast, more qualitative research was advocated. The traditional scientific approach which was characterized by an exhaustive use of quantitative methods increasingly came under attack: “The research model becomes a substitute for intimate knowledge of the field being studied”, argued Tomkins and Groves [1983, p. 363]. Viewed as inadequate in capturing the rich social fabric of accounting’s role in an organizational setting, alternative qualitative-based research agendas were advocated.
Both historians and accountants have discovered that “when it came to the really big issues in history, it had to remain silent, because they could not be solved by quantitative methods” [Elton in Fogel and Elton, 1983] and that the pursuit of truly scientific accounting is, like the pursuit of truly scientific history, “a mirage” [Evans, 1997, p. 41]. Hence, “the accountant is indeed someone who is capable of making the accounts as well as recording them” [Hopwood, 1994, p. 299]. In history, “the deconstructive turn in contemporary thought [sees] history not as a record of the past, more or less faithful to the facts, [but] as an invention, or fiction, of historians themselves” [Samuel, 1992, pp. 220-221]. As Hines [1992] suggests in the accounting context, “in communicating reality, we construct reality”.

CONCLUSION

This paper has explored the scientific conceptualization of history and accounting, contributing fresh comparisons and contrasts between change in history and accounting. It has highlighted similarities in the 19th and 20th century experiences of professional history and professional accounting. These conclusions potentially offer research opportunities at the intersections between history and accounting. Such research could include the nature of evidence and judgment in history and accounting as well as how such judgments are used in the construction of contestable, historical reality in both history and accounting. In that context, the contrasting attributes of attestation in history and accounting are also worthy of exploration.

The professionalization of history may be characterized by von Ranke’s argument that history attempts to represent “the inner being of the past” [Evans, 1997, p. 17]. Accounting, similarly, struggles to portray the “substance of transactions” [Accounting Standards Board, 1994]. Hence, both professions have adopted the role of reporting “reality” in differing domains — the accounting domain a limited one, the history domain a wider one. The claims of historians, in particular, to professional status have their origins in the portrayal of history as a scientific discipline, an angel of rationality above the passion of patriotism and the interplay of sectional interests. While these claims are less acute in accounting, its method nonetheless exuded an aura of exactitude and objectivity, a sense of certainty surrounding single numbers. This scientific angle of rhetoric rendered both history and accounting exclusive in method, drawing on documents and transactions and leaving many elements of the less tangible world unwritten and unread. In doing so, they found fertile ground in the emerging respect for science in the 19th century while sowing the seeds of their own decline in a 20th century increasingly suspicious of the claims of science.

The hygienization of history and accounting in the early stages of their professionalization left them sterile, their propa-gation as “cults of impersonality” [Porter, 1995, p. 90 in refer-ence to objectivity in accounting] left out rich and diverse ele-ments of the reality they attempted to portray. In limiting the field of inquiry and mapping the landscape by means which were ostensibly objective ones, both history and accounting left much of the terrain unmeasured and unrecognized and open to the inroads and explorations of other disciplines. As we enter the 21st century, the challenge facing both history and accounting is how to record and represent an increasingly complex “reality”, significant elements of which are not necessarily discovered in documents or measurable by traditional means.

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