Abstract
The August issue includes six full articles, a commentary on Detzen and Hoffmann’s (2020) award-winning paper (‘Accountability and ideology: The case of a German university under the Nazi regime’), and the calls for papers for the Eleventh Accounting History International Conference (11AHIC) being held in Portsmouth, United Kingdom, during 7–9 September 2022 and three upcoming Special Issues: Accounting and the Exploitation of the Natural World, Accounting for Natural Disasters: An Historical Perspective and Accounting History Research in the Age of Digitalisation. We would encourage you to examine these opportunities and to contact the Special Issue Guest Editors when you need further clarification.
Authors drawn from Australia, France, Germany and Italy have written for this issue, with articles spanning from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The issue begins by considering the impact of external (governmental) controls, starting first with Twyford’s thanopolitical visualisation of Nazi Germany. Also reflecting on that era is Fülbier’s commentary on Detzen and Hoffmann (2020). The Detzen and Hoffmann (2020) article, which won the Robert Gibson Award for 2020, along with Fülbier in this issue highlights several research agendas, some of which are also covered by articles in this issue.
Leoni studies how an Italian priest, Peccenini, who sought to establish a colony in the South Pacific, utilised accounting to legitimate his efforts. In terms of quasi-regulation, Lambert analyses the shaping of corporate governance, using Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power. Taking the promise of utopian governance, the issue then moves to companies’ internal arrangements, examining accounting fraud in pre-modern Italy (Agostini, Cella and Favero) and internal governance controls in inter-war France (Bensadon). The issue finishes with a mixed-methods reflection on the use of theory in accounting history by Ferri, Lusiani and Pareschi. Brief summaries of the articles follow.
The politically driven regulation and management of citizens within Nazi Germany are the focus of the first two articles. Twyford introduces Agamben’s (1995, 2002, 2005) ‘thanatopolitics’, which is the politics of death, alongside Foucault’s theory of ‘bio-politics’, further adding a ‘financial bios’ to shed light on how business and calculative practices bring about a State’s ideology. She analyses how companies were captured by Nazi Germany, with, for example, Deutsche Bank diverting Jewish wealth to the State and then misreporting these actions. Ford Werke is presented as an example of a firm that exploited these impoverished people, especially those in concentration camps and foreigners who were treated as ‘work slaves’. Dehumanisation of prisoners made it easier to ignore their rights and thus explain away the mass murders which marked the holocaust.
Fülbier comments on Detzen and Hoffmann’s (2020) analysis of German academics within a single university, also during the Third Reich. He concludes there is more to say about this period and personal accountability, drawing on other relevant work to highlight the effect of the regime on staff, students and universities themselves. Fülbier encourages more research on this era to assist our understanding of totalitarian influence on academic life.
The political theme continues with Leoni’s article which is both the biography of a settler and an overview of the colony he hoped to create. Following her close analysis of Peccenini’s nineteenth-century book proposing an Australian colony for impoverished Italians, as well as others of his publications, Leoni traces his dissatisfaction with the church and his numerous failed attempts to realise his dream. Of particular interest is Peccenini’s draft budgets as he projected a self-supporting or independent colony in respect of agriculture and salaries for workers. Indeed, she notes that despite inaccuracies in the budgets, ‘accounting was used as an advocating device to promote the opportunity for new colonial settlements’, thus demonstrating accounting’s embeddedness in society.
The fourth article, by Lambert, also utilises Foucauldian theory, in this case by applying the concept of disciplinary power to proxy advisory firms. These firms, which have formed progressively in the last 50 years, serve institutional investors seeking to make informed voting decisions and are often seen as quasi-regulators of corporate governance. Increasingly from the late 1980s, their work has been abetted by information technology. Furthermore, the development of analysis models to inform proxy advisory firms’ recommendations led to their increased corporate influence as their rankings of corporates and executives were published. Lambert further notes that the expectation that mutual funds’ fiduciary responsibilities include voting at their investees’ Annual General Meetings has increased the power of the information that proxy advisory firms produce and sell.
Rather than unintentional budget errors (as in Leoni), Agostini et al. focus on intentional budget errors in their micro-history. This fifth article is a century earlier and concentrates on financial fraud in the eighteenth century. Agostini et al. examine one business in the Venetian ceramic industry where a partner diverted funds for his own use. Documents from the ensuing litigation highlight the accounting misstatements and the case settlement. The article is underpinned by a systematic literature review on fraud in the pre-modern period, at a time when there were no accounting standards. Utilising Van Driel’s (2019) extension of the concept of the fraud triangle to include regulation and consequences of contested practices, Agostini et al. examine the accounting manipulations and how they were dealt with in Italy in this early period. This research provides a base for further research into accounting fraud and misstatement.
The sixth article considers French corporate governance in the inter-war period. Bensadon also examines a fast-growing business, but in this case an aluminium producer in which, rather than defrauding it, the directors worked collaboratively to manage the company’s financial and material resources. Their actions compensated for a lack of external governance and the ineffectiveness of statutory audit. Due to French businesses’ hostility to external controls, the audit was symbolic, and reporting maintained the practice of business secrecy. Yet, the corporate archive provides a view into the role of accounting in assisting internal governance, specifically requirements for subsidiaries and other associated companies to report regularly, and for directors to monitor these entities. Financial reports were also utilised for managing working capital requirements, highlighting accounting’s role in empowering decision-making.
The last contribution of this issue, by Ferri et al., examines ways of theorising in accounting history research. The necessity for theory has been debated for many years and the authors use Llewellyn’s (2003) five levels of theorising to categorise and account for the ways in which theory has been used over two decades in six accounting and accounting history journals. Using a topic modelling approach, Ferri et al. examine important words in topics and the prevalence of topics throughout the 1,300 sampled papers. While the analysis reinforces categories developed in prior accounting history literature reviews, the mixed-methods approach usefully highlights five thematic clusters and two main data sources, but more specifically seven different topics on ways of theorising. Their analysis moves this controversial topic beyond a dichotomy to ‘different shades’ of theorising, including narrating, conceptualising, theorising settings and grand theorising, giving further insights into particular related topics and areas for future research.