Accounting for and accounts of death: Past,present and future possibilities

Abstract

Despite being an inevitable consequence of living, accounting for and accounts of death are under-researched in the accounting history literature. In this article, we review this literature and find that only a few studies engage beyond a mere reference to death; and even fewer that attempt to account for or provide accounts of death. Those studies that attempt to provide an account fall into two broad categories. First, those that treat death as a transactional phenomenon; and second, those that call for some form of accountability for death, a phenomenon we term necroaccountability. Further, we highlight a third space where accounting and death coalesce in the business of death. Through this process, we identify opportunities to increase our knowledge of accounting and death by understanding the ways in which it has been conceptualised and mobilised in the past.

Keywords

accounting history death literature review necroaccountability

Introduction

Despite death and dying being an inevitable consequence of living, accounting researchers tend to confine death to a transactional phenomenon in calculative practices; or a consequence of an event or organisational activity that gives rise to demands for accountability. In this article, we review the existing accounting history literature that engages with accounting for and accounts of death and provide an agenda for future research. We embarked on this project with an assumption that conceptualising death would be relatively straightforward. Consistent with Le Theule et al. (2020: 528) we found that defining death is ‘a source of controversy’. Similar to the perceived understanding that accounting is a technical and objective practice, we find that life and death, even as binary absolutes, are social practices. In other words, context is everything, and our understanding of death, just as our understanding of accounting, is embedded in social structures, cultural norms, and political institutions.

One of our first tasks was to determine how the concept of death is addressed in the accounting history literature. For example, death is often used metaphorically in an organisational context to connote the demise of financial sustainability or some kind of slippage towards insolvency or bankruptcy; the end of a scholarly discipline; or the destruction of the environment. With this in mind, we determined to confine our review to human death and set about deciding how to group or categorise this literature. This task presented a classification challenge; thus, we adopted a thematic and critical reflective approach to determine our two broad categories. We also ‘stepped outside’ the accounting history literature to include historical accounts and calculative practices that we considered relevant and consistent with our classification criteria. While we found scant evidence of death as an empirical phenomenon in the accounting history literature, we did find examples where it featured implicitly in calculative practices, accounting for, and explicitly in accountability settings, accounts of. The first category considers studies of the transformation of the phenomena of death into something that enables differing forms of transactions. In this stream of literature, death was subject to calculative practices and therefore accounted for. For example, accounting for slavery or the valuation practices in the illegal trade in corpses by the ‘resurrectionists’ in Victorian Britain¹ and elsewhere. The second category, accounts of death, a practice we define as necroaccountability, include examples such as attempts to hold ‘those responsible’ for death accountable following armed conflict or non-military disaster.

The following section provides the foundation of our approach to understand both death and accounting as social practices. We then provide an overview of our method and rationale for the collation and categorisation of scholarly articles to inform the structure of the review and subsequent analysis of the literature (Cordery, 2015; Brennan and Solomon, 2008). The article contributes to the literature by developing critical insights and offering new pathways for accounting researchers to engage with the often hidden or invisible aspect of life, death.

Death, accounting and society

According to anthropologists, birth² and death are cultural markers that scope community narratives about what constitutes being human (Fordyce, 2013). In particular,

[d]eath is an institutionalized phenomenon which is attended in many ways. Surrounding it are many diverse customs, rites and beliefs…Sociologically, death can be viewed as the nucleus of a particular culture complex involving a group of interrelated cultural traits which function together in a more or less consistent and meaningful way (Faunce and Fulton, 1958: 205).

Similarly, Samuel (2013: x) argues that ‘death is a rich metaphysical stew combining elements of philosophy, psychology, religion, anthropology and sociology’ (in Dobscha, 2016: 2). Therefore, while we could have taken a conceptual understanding of death rooted in science or provided a plethora of situational definitions, we decided to adopt a sociological stance to our review. Our reasoning was based on our understanding that accounting is also a sociological practice. Death is a package of interrelated constructs, often disentangled for analytical purposes, but nonetheless situated within a broader social context.

The rituals and practices of death are the customary and regulatory norms for attending to death in a given society. The intermediaries, commonly the role of the funeral director in modern western society, consists of those that deal with death at a distance, often shifting death to a sanitised, safe or commercial realm (Dobscha, 2016). Accounts include the wide range of media that inscribe death, such as memorialisation. While physical death occurs in a highly regulated environment of classification, the expert disciplinary knowledge that writes and examines phenomena, does not do so ‘in precisely the same way in all times and places’ (Hoskin and Macve, 1994: 68). Death from a temporal orientation speaks of the end of life and separation from the living. Obversely, a spiritual worldview often privileges the idea of death as a transition to another form of life. The death-care industry takes into account a range of business practices and impacts such as regulation, the impact of capital and the role of markets and privatisation. Therefore, in addition to the technical or clinical aspects of death, the construct is embedded in and derives meaning from broader social institutions or contexts.

Since death is nuanced, situated, contextual and ubiquitous, it can be addressed in similar ways to the way we approach our scholarship of accounting and calculative practices as ritualised norms, accountants as intermediaries, and accounts as providing accountability in a plethora of contextual spaces. By the eighteenth century theorists clearly understood the link between calculative practices and everyday life and death.

There can be no well-ordered political machinery or enlightened administration … without a knowledge of the state of the population, and the numbering of persons, goods, activities, births, crimes, deaths and much else provides the material upon which administrative calculation can operate (Rose, 1999: 210).

Calculative information relating to death serves multiple purposes including risk assessment, health policy formation and the allocation of healthcare resources. How these calculative practices are mobilised as meaningful accounts involves human and non-human intermediaries.

The power of an account, such as a death certificate or financial report, lies in the ‘simplest level of its inscription, … [it] writes value and presents that writing in a space for examination – be it of physical flows, monetary values of human performance, of past events, present states or future possibilities’ (Hoskin and Macve, 1994: 67). Death certification writes life (death) and also establishes the point at which individual humans are transformed from ‘bodies’ into ‘corpses’ or ‘cadavers’– rendering them transactional. Further, the corpse after death, as Heidegger (1977) argues, becomes a profane thing, something to be discarded, but not before profiteering. For example, the global market of human tissue and body parts dehumanises and commodifies the dead (Bogard, 2008: 188).

Death is also often absent from official narratives. For example, the creation of certain phenomena as strategic visibilities in accounts renders death opaque or invisible. For example, as Chwastiak (2008: 573) argues;

[i]f death and destruction is vanquished from official representations, then it must be the case that a state's ability to convince its citizens to wage war depends on silencing these horrors.

The inscriptions of death, therefore, reside in an almost inexhaustive range of media, both tangible and intangible. While we were interested in studies that either subject death to calculative practices as accounts for death and those that attempt to hold the state, institutions or organisations responsible through accounts of death, we took a broad view of what constitutes an account. While this accountability often resides outside the scope of official reporting or an immediate sphere of responsibility, we also consider the role of various historical intermediaries and identified research areas where the silencing of death occurs.

Method

In this article we reviewed the history literature where the phenomenon of death is identified in relation to accounting. While the decision about what we considered appropriate is subjective, we took inspiration from the aims and objectives of Accounting History³ to ‘provide historical perspectives on current issues’ that ‘inform or guide contemporary and future decision makers on accounting, organisational and social policy and associated regulatory developments’, including both calculative practices and accountability. The data consists of studies that used past events to augment our ‘understanding of accounting's past and use that understanding to elucidate accounting's present and its possible future development’ with respect to death.

In addition, we broadly defined accounting, accountability, and what constitutes an account consistent with the interpretation of Sargiacomo et al. (2012: 396);

…to embrace documents of any kind which typically use text and numbers in structured or unstructured ways to provide records of commitments and transactions between named and unnamed parties.

Since we adopted an interdisciplinary focus, we incorporated material from non-accounting sources to add to our understanding of how death and accounting could be approached in future studies.

We initially conducted a keyword search in the specialist accounting history journals that is Accounting History (AH), Accounting History Review (AHR), Accounting Historian's Journal (AHJ) and Accounting, Business & Financial History (ABFH)⁴. Additionally, we reviewed the premier accounting journals: The Accounting Review (TAR), Contemporary Accounting Research (CAR), European Accounting Review (EAR), Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), as well as other leading journals that are renowned as publishing history studies Abacus: A Journal of Accounting, Finance and Business Studies (Abacus), Accounting Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ), the British Accounting Review (BAR), and Critical Perspectives on Accounting (CPA) (see Table 1)⁵. A word search on the term ‘death’ was conducted using relevant databases for each journal and includes all material available electronically to the end of 2020. Each article was reviewed to determine whether death was addressed or studied in a manner we considered relevant or not relevant. An overview of the results is provided in Table 1 below.

Table 1.

Review of the literature.

						Analysis
Journal	Date Range	Total	Obituaries	Historical Figure/s	Other	Caclulative Practices	Necroaccountabilty
Accounting History	1998–2020	164	8	71	71	11	3
Accounting Historians Journal	1979–2020	81	7	60	12	2	0
Accounting, Business & Financial History	1997–2010	63	0	49	13	1	0
Accounting History Review	2011–2020	49	3	33	12	1	0
Abacus: A Journal of Accounting, Finance and Business Studies	1965–2020	22	2	7	13	0	0
Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal	1992–2020	58	5	1	47	3	2
Accounting and Business Research	1970–2020	27	6	5	16	0	0
Accounting, Organizations and Society	1976–2020	4	1	1	1	0	1
The Accounting Review	1930–2020	14	4	0	10	0	0
British Accounting Review	1988–2020	14	0	5	9	0	0
Contemporary Accounting Research	1984–2020	11	0	0	11	0	0
Critical Perspectives on Accounting	1990–2020	10	1	3	0	0	6
European Accounting Review	1997–2020	35	1	10	24	0	0
		552	38	245	239	18	12

Since all instances of the term death were investigated the original data set was large but yielded an overwhelming result of non-relevant articles⁶. This included articlers where death was used as a metaphor (‘death’ of a company, ‘death’ of accounting history) or death only appeared in the reference list or footnotes/endnotes to the paper. As an example, TAR registered 193 ‘hits’ on the term ‘death’, but only 14 articles were considered relevant. As with all data collection, the process involved decisions of selection and representation. Is the article an obituary or a biography of an important historical figure or an account of death? For example, Baker's (2019) article on Thomas Jefferson's slave bookkeeping references both Jefferson's death, as the end of a period of his meticulous bookkeeping in 1826, and also a statement of fact in a letter to George Washington about how he accounts for the deaths of slaves, ‘I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently credit four per cent per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers’ (Wiencek, 2012: 3 in Baker, 2019: 248). Therefore, in a quest for consistency all articles included in Table 1 were reviewed⁷.

Table 1 records a total of 552 articles. However, while mentioning human death, the majority were not included in the in-depth analysis (see section 4). For example, obituaries, remarks about a deceased person or death of a historical figure or figures, and a significant group of ‘other’ that only referenced the number of deaths or a statement of ‘fact’ were not pursued further.

While most journals pay homage to influential leaders in the field by publishing obituaries, these were not considered to meet the criteria of a contribution in respect of death. Similarly, many studies that appear in the data set reference the death of historical figure/s. In many cases death is only significant as it creates a point of disjuncture for accounting practice or the commencement or cessation of the keeping of records (e.g. the transition from a dictatorship to some form of democracy). Many articles contained biographical details of a person involved in the professionalisation of accounting including their death (e.g. Bisman, 2012; Carnegie, 2005) or some figure that has presided over the keeping of accounts, such as Tsar of Russia Peter I (see Sokolov, 2019) or the international trader Francesco di Marco Datini (see Kuter et al., 2020). In these articles there were no accounts for or account of death.

The group of articles categorised as ‘other’ is large and includes death that results in a form of change, such as the end of auditor or director tenure. These articles include studies of audit and executive remuneration or consider hospital costing, catastrophes and estimates of death due to war or pestilence (see e.g. Schwartz and Menon, 1985). The topics covered in this category were broad and varied in methodology, timeframe studied, context, and unit of analysis. Articles ranged from a study of the impact of donor death on Buddhist temple income and expenditure reports in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Sankoji, 2020) to the theoretical framing of the entrepreneurial aspects of an eighteenth century Spanish religious order (see Sanchez-Matamoros and Fenech, 2019). This group accepted death as unproblematic and objective, a mere statement of fact.

The remaining 30 articles, identified in Table 1 under the heading of Analysis, were considered not only relevant, but worthy of further detailed analysis. These studies identified death as important in relation to either calculative practices or some notion of accountability. Where death was enumerated or valued, or made visible through accounting practices, we classified the articles as death as a transactional phenomenon (accounts for). Where death was a consequence or a responsibility of institutional or organisational activities, we classified these articles as representative of necroaccountability (accounts of). Inevitably, a group of articles could be identified as belonging to both categories and analysed accordingly (see e.g., Lippman and Wilson, 2007). However, each article was only counted once in Table 1. In addition to the analysis below, each section provides insights for potential future research.

Analysis

Death as a transactional phenomenon

Much of the historical literature where death and accounting coalesce is in the context of institutions. Most prevalent are military, medical or welfare organisations, or instances where labour is institutionalised, such as slavery practices. In these sites, the fundamental accounting premise of objectification, combined with the concept of ownership and/or control, renders death transactional. This practice of transforming a cadaver/corpse/body part to something that can be subjected to calculative practices, and, depending on the context, represented as an asset, liability, a source of revenue (gains), or expense (losses) is a process of objectification, monetisation and, in some cases, commodification. The primary focus of this accounting history literature is on the site or context of these calculative practices, rather than the practices themselves. We found several instances where death was rendered ‘transactable’ by being accounted for. In most cases, death was treated as an economic transaction that belonged in the ‘accounts’.

Death as a transactional phenomenon was identified within the following categories (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Death as a transactional phenomenon.

Category	Number of Articles
Slavery	6
War/Holocaust	3
Medical/Welfare Institutions	6
Insurance/Assurance	2
Other	1
Total	18

Slavery

The most prevalent single site of the transformation of a human to ‘something’ to mobilise calculative practices is that of slavery. While slavery is a complex concept and predominately involves questions of race/ethnicity, these studies prioritised technical questions such as the costs of labour in production. Death is accounted for as a by-product or inevitable consequence of slavery and production. In this group of articles, slaves were regarded as productive ‘assets’ and accounted for as inventory. Much of the accounting for slaves was based on skills and potential productivity. Therefore, the valuation of life required a consideration of death in the calculative practice. For example, as Tyson and Oldroyd (2019: 224) highlight, ‘increases and decreases in slaves were routinely juxtaposed with the increases and decreases in livestock’. While much of the slavery literature is focused on valuation and control, or even return on investment (see McWatters, 2008), Fleischman and Tyson (2004) correctly conclude that accounting also sustained slavery since it facilitated the quantification and monetisation of human attributes.

Several articles report gains or losses on the sale of slaves (see Hollister and Schultz, 2010). For example, Thomas Jefferson, in advice to friends, recognised slaves as a self-generating asset –‘invest in … negroes, which besides being a present support bring a silent profit of from 5 to 10 per cent by the increase in their numbers’ (Wiencek, 2012: 4 in Baker, 2019: 248). Commercially, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century slaves were an economically rational investment. In studies of pre-American Civil War, it was estimated that ‘enslaved black people formed the second most valuable capital asset’ (Baker, 2019: 248). This asset necessarily required valuation and accounts for changes in ‘inventory’. Even in death slaves could be valuable and transacted. US medical schools regularly purchased bodies of slaves. Berry (2018: 10) reports ‘adult cadavers cost $12, mothers and their infants cost $15, and children from ages 4 to 10 were worth $8.'

Landowners that employed slaves were often absent and demanded information and explanations from management about increases and decreases in the workforce. ‘By forcing their agents to compile these reports, the owners were able to hold them to account’ (Fleischman et al., 2004: 42). For example, Tyson and Oldroyd (2019: 223–4) reproduce an excerpt from one of these accounts to the landowners for the Thomas River Estate in Jamaica in 1780.

‘Little London’ had died from ‘eating dirt,’ a common form of slave resistance. Betty, 'a new negro wench [was] afeared to have brought a venereal complaint with her, which brought her into a bad habit that killed her.’ Ned died ‘of a dropsy’ and ‘Little Quashy of worms.’

Given that slavery is more often about the subjugation of racial or ethnic groups for economic or political reasons, accounts (or absence of accounts) or accounting for death that foregrounds the intersection of race/ethnicity and forced labour is an opportunity for further research. Especially in the context of emergent, albeit often hidden forms of slavery.

War and the holocaust

The literature, particularly focussing on accounting for death in the context of war and the Holocaust, is often found in books or non-accounting journals (see e.g., Funnell and Chwastiak, 2015). Of those in accounting journals, the focus tends to be on the need for political elites to calculate the cost of war to legitimise and appropriate funds for a war effort. As Funnell (2009) argues, despite war and the substantial amount of government expenditure committed to the financial needs of defence forces, studies researching accounting for war have focused almost exclusively on military accounts. These accounts of war ignore the social and human costs, rendering death invisible in formal accounting records (Funnell and Chwastiak, 2010).

In instances where we found human cost treated in a transactional manner, the accounting history literature in our sample was confined to the Holocaust⁸ and the ways in which violence and death are silenced or rendered invisible by bureaucratic means. For example,

Accounting as an instrument of the German civil bureaucracy who were responsible for the transportation of Jews to extermination sites provided at ‘centers of calculation’ new quantitative visibilities (Miller, 1990: 318), which were able to supplant the qualitative dimensions of the Jews as individuals by commodifying and dehumanizing them and, thereby, for all intents make them invisible as individuals with the sacred right to life (Funnell and Chwastiak, 2015: 128).

Sobering evidence from the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald provided by Lippman and Wilson (2007) demonstrates the ease with which calculative practices allowed death and killing to be rendered invisible. While the income statement included profit per prison labourer, it also calculated expected revenue at death from ‘the value of the deceased's personal clothing, valuables, currency, gold extracted from the teeth of the deceased, and sales of hair, fat (for soap) and ashes for fertilizer, less the cost of cremation’ (Lippman and Wilson, 2007: 288). Lippman and Wilson (2007) also present other uses for calculative practices, such as efficiency measures to reduce the costs of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’. For example, a cost-benefit analysis using the cost of ‘gas’ resulted in the killing of children by burning alive rather than gassing then burning. Similarly, using less gas to kill adults reduced gas expenses but prolonged the time it took to die (see Lippman and Wilson, 2007).

Calculative practices, shift the focus from the action to the technicalities of war and associated civilian atrocities (Antonelli et al., 2018). Transformation of humans to something other than human, such as casualties of war or Untermenschen⁹ renders death transactable, possible and efficient. Below and elsewhere, questions of culpability and the responsibility of accountants for death due to war or related practices have been considered (discussed further in the following section). For example, in a teaching case study on the Holocaust, Lippman (2009) poses the question of whether accountants have responsibility for the information they report. Additionally, Lippman argues that accounting is culpable in sustaining such extreme violence (such as occurred alongside slavery and the Holocaust) by ‘normalizing immoral behaviours’ (2009: 76).

In summary, the political nature of war and consequentially, accounting for war, tends to focus on cost accounting for armies and armaments, and financial control. Therefore, histories of war and military engagement render death and human cost or suffering invisible. A more complete accounting history of war and armed conflict would interrogate the costs of death from both the perspective of the aggressor and the opposing side. In recent history there has also been an increase of non-state conflicts (genocide). While accounts are not always available and language may be an issue, opportunities exist. For example, accounting for the active presence of French troops and provision of arms in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 where up to 1 million deaths were reported (see Uvin, 2001). These histories could also examine post-conflict death such as the death of displaced persons.

Hospitals/welfare institutions

Our search found six articles relating to death as a transactional phenomenon in the context of hospitals and welfare institutions. All but one of these articles were case studies covering a variety of medical institutions, including, a foundling hospital in Miley and Read (2016a); an insane asylum in Funnell et al. (2017); and a ‘free’ hospital in Holden et al. (2009). Despite different time periods ranging from the fifteenth century (Baker, 2016) to the nineteenth century (Funnell et al., 2017) and location, there is a strong commonality in the way these disparate institutions accounted for death. That is, death was recorded as a form of disposition of those that had previously entered the institution. In all articles, the institution had developed in response to poverty and had a welfare/moral, as well as a health/medical mission. Only Miley and Read (2016a: 173), however, record expenses relating to death.

The Matron was responsible for ensuring the child received an appropriate burial and for maintaining an account book listing the name, date and circumstances of death for each child.

This absence of financial accounts in these articles is notable, especially since it is likely that records exist. Business historians (see e.g., King, 2018) demonstrate that financing death was very important in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. Dying in an institution with direct links to compromised social status had repercussions for both the decedent spiritually and the family socially. For example, pauper graves were vulnerable to resurrectionists (bodysnatchers) (see Moerman and van der Laan, 2021). Research opportunities exist within the considerable archival material available which could provide insights as to the issues such as how death has been medicalised, development of attitudes towards death, funeral practices, and financing death care.

The final article in this category covers more recent developments in accounting whereby death is a component of performance indicators. The article (Jackson et al., 2013) documents the introduction and implementation of medical audits in the UK National Health Service (NHS) as a means to improve accountability for the use of resources by medical staff. In this setting, an audit is a vehicle to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and quality (Jackson et al., 2013: 25). For example, death is reported in a number of ways,

end results of the care provided to patients (classified as recovered, not recovered, improved, not improved, not treated, in for diagnosis only, died); death rate expressed as a ratio of all deaths to total discharges and deaths in a given period, analysed for the hospital as a whole, by the services provided and by physicians; anaesthesia death rate, that is deaths caused by anaesthetic agents; postoperative death rate, that is death connected with an operation; maternal death rate, that is the ratio of maternal death to obstetrical discharges; infant death rate, that is the ratio of death of infants newly born in the hospital to viable deaths (Jackson et al., 2013: 43).

There is an opportunity for research that embraces a more nuanced understanding of death as an input into performance metrics. The question for Jackson et al. (2013) is whether this kind of metric is in place to create accountabilities for medical professionals in relation to death, or accountabilities merely for the efficacy of financial and physical resources used? Have these performance indicators become more refined over time? Are similar metrics in place in other jurisdictions?

Death as a risk

It is not surprising to find death as transactional phenomena in articles that cover mutual benefit societies or life assurance. Importantly, death is the risk event that is accounted for (provisioned). What was surprising was to find only two articles¹⁰ in the journal search. The first article by Chandar and Miranti (2007) studies the transition from a bespoke system of pension accounting to an actuarial model of estimation in the early twentieth century. This is significant as actuarial/mortality tables were developed in the seventeenth century with the introduction of life insurance.

The second article by Pierotti et al. (2020) studied a mutual benefit society and the accrual plan to provide a pension to surviving families on a member's death. The practice of sharing costs in relation to death can be traced back to ancient Rome and the existence of Fratres. Fratres were burial clubs set up by the poor to club together to pay for funerals of members and to aid the surviving family members (Chaplin et al., 2009). Schemes such as these remain in place today, albeit largely corporatised. However, it is hard to imagine another site where death so tightly coalesces with the calculative practices of accounting, yet it has been an under-researched site for accounting historians until recently (Moerman and van der Laan, 2021).

Other sites

Death as a transactional phenomenon in a more unique setting is evident in the study of the potential impact of non-reported contingent liabilities for the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company for worker and third-party fatality (among other losses) (Daniels and Flesher, 1991). The study covers a period (1903–1904) when an authoritative source for the treatment of contingent liabilities did not exist The authors used data from other sources to reconstruct a counterfactual balance sheet for the company. While the disclosures of death-related events were not material at the time, this treatment of death is consistent with other examples where death of employees or product and service users is regarded as a mere cost of doing business (see e.g., McCulloch, 1986).

Literature on product safety and workers’ health and safety is emerging, but it is not prevalent in the accounting history literature (see e.g. Moerman and van der Laan, 2011). These studies tend to focus on accountability rather than the transactional aspects of death. With the ever-increasing requirements for disclosure, whether in the realm of financial or sustainability reporting, we should expect to see an increase in this kind of research as data becomes more freely available.

Necroaccountability

While the previous section considers studies that speak to the need for managers to engage in calculative practices to provide an account, this section is dedicated to articles relating to death as a consequence of organisational or institutional activity. Since it involves the responsibility for the giving or making an account of death, we refer to this as ‘necroaccountability’. Necro comes from the Greek nekros meaning corpse; therefore, necroaccountability refers to a responsibility for the giving or making an account of death.

Several philosophers agree that modern man has abandoned death as a philosophy and replaced it as an issue for science, albeit with interruptions during periods of massacre or disastrous events (Shariatinia, 2015). In the accounting history literature, there are several studies that consider death in relation to war and war-related practices, natural and man-made disasters, and civilian violations of human rights.

The following studies are grouped according to the site of necroaccountability, such as war and disaster; or the mechanism of accountability, such as grave markers (see Table 3)¹¹.

Table 3.

Necroaccountability.

Category	Number of Articles
War/Holocaust	6
Disasters	6
Alternative Accounts	0^a
Total	12

The two articles analysed in detail in this category remain unpublished conference papers at the time of writing.

War/holocaust

‘Death is the ultimate cost of war and this is not unknown to politicians' (Chwastiak, 2008: 578).

Within this classification, two broad sites emerged – accounting for death in war and the Holocaust The story is similar in both cases, war has served the economic and political interests of both the State and capital (Chwastiak, 2008). In relation to accounting for war, Heier (2010) refers to the American Civil War, as creating an opportunity for profit, however the article focusses on the business and economic aspects of military engagement rather than death per se (Heier, 2010). As an example of accounting for death from a socio-political perspective, Chwastiak (2001, 2006, 2008) and Chwastiak and Lehman (2008) study US government budgets for war. They find that the cost of death, albeit an inevitable consequence of war, is not budgeted for despite the existence of a sophisticated process of calculation in actuarial and other statistical techniques. Despite a plethora of articles on accounting and war (see e.g. Funnell and Chwastiak, 2010), a specific focus on accountability for death is largely absent.

One of the initial forays into tackling the issue of accounts and accountability for deaths as a consequence of the Holocaust was Funnell (1998). Twenty-five years ago, this was a novel idea in accounting and Funnell (1998) drew on the argument of social constructionism for the facilitation and rationalisation of racial annihilation. In relation to the role of accounting and the operationalisation of genocide two themes emerged. First, accounting facilitated the efficient war machine of the Holocaust. Second, it served to sanitise the theft of Jewish property by removing individual responsibility for the subsequent genocide. This theme of expropriation is taken up by Antonelli et al. (2018: 2168) in their exploration of the Fascist programme of anti-Semitism in Italy during World War II and the vital work of the ‘desk-killers’, escaping the moral implications of annihilation by sitting behind administrative duties.

The Holocaust has remained a topic of interest in accounting history, especially with the adoption of alternative theoretical frameworks, such as Agamben's state of exception and Foucault's biopolitics that speak directly to the idea of necroaccountability. While outside our data collection period, Twyford (2021) used the politics of death, thanatopolitics, as a lens to explore how financial death through expropriation leads to the removal from political life and ultimately physical death. In this case, she demonstrates how the State policy of Aryanisation was embedded in the accounting practices of several large private enterprises. Both Twyford (2021) and Lippman and Wilson (2007) explore how the costs of misdeeds, including death were distorted or silenced, and thus contributed to the ongoing genocide in Nazi Germany.

Death and disasters

Disasters have been defined broadly as adverse events that occur relatively infrequently (Sargiacomo et al., 2014). The following analysis groups these studies according to whether the state or corporate entities are called to account for disasters, wrongful deaths, occupational disease or work-related accidents.

Death is often accepted by citizenry as a necessary, but unintended outcome of the state's effort to protect and defend property, civil rights or a particular ‘way of life’. However, where death is a result of a disaster, some form of state accountability is demanded. Even in times of conflict, governments can commit illegitimate acts or use ‘illegal’ means that result in death. For example, Sargiacomo et al. (2012) reveal State-sponsored targeted killings of perceived enemies in Venice in the sixteenth century. The focus of the article is not on the deaths per se, rather, the question of responsibility for these premeditated killings. Using a Machiavellian framework and adopting Sinclair’s (1995) metaphor of the chameleon, the authors demonstrate a novel form of contextual necroaccountability referred to as ‘secretive collective internal horizontal accountability’ (Sargiacomo et al., 2012: 393). In other words, a collective questioning of responsibility from within the sphere of power about the accountability owed to citizens. More recently, the death of 96 football fans at the Hillsborough Football Stadium provides an example of a 30-year battle to hold the police accountable for ‘unlawful killing’ (Cooper and Lapsley, 2021). By challenging the official narrative of blame, the authors demonstrate how, collectively, citizens have the power to reveal the injustices of the past.

A further example of state-related accountability for death is found in Hammond et al.’s (2017) investigation of the state/capital symbiotic relationship of a large mining company, Anglo American, and the apartheid government in South Africa between 1917 and 1975. This relationship sustained the economic and political power of both ‘reviled work practices’ and the adoption of impression management to downplay the deaths of protesting employees by South African police at times during this period (Hammond et al., 2017: 1400).

Corporations have the opportunity to escape responsibility when partnered with an oppressive regime; especially in situations where culpability sits within the shadows of national political agendas (Bannerjee, 2008). Therefore, disastrous occupational accidents or work-related disease resulting in calls for corporate accountability are another research area we found within the accounting history literature. For example, the challenge to the basic human right to engage in a safe work environment was studied by Cooper et al. (2011) in relation to the ICL gas explosion in Scotland which killed nine workers. Further, the investigation of deaths resulting from exposure to asbestos in an Aboriginal mining community in Australia was examined by Moerman and van der Laan (2011). In both these cases, the weak institutional environment provided an opportunity for worker, and subsequently community, exploitation.

Sargiacomo et al. (2014) suggest that disasters can be focussing events that provide new insights into accountability. For example, the manifestation of chronic and lethal disease from exposure to toxic substances or ‘faulty’ products such as breast implants, mobile phone usage or pharmaceuticals. Since the consequences can occur several decades later, studying the historical context, especially the normalised behaviours and attitudes, could be particularly insightful. Even to the extent of considering the suffering ‘other’ in the past and in the present as necroaccountability for intergenerational deaths. In the context of an evolving legal environment, corporate manslaughter as institutionalised accountability for death arising from corporate-related disasters is an emergent paradigm. Additionally, while natural disasters have been studied in the accounting literature (see e.g. Perkiss and Moerman, 2020; Sargiacomo, 2015; Sargiacomo et al., 2014), the specific question of responsibility or accountability for deaths is a further area for accounting history researchers.

Alternative accounts of death

Financial reports and other formal accounts record death as a statistic or input into other representations, such as reporting on work, health and safety, or calculating provisions for liabilities. In addition, particular social and environmental reporting frameworks specifically require a disclosure for deaths. For example, Sustainable Development Goal 3: Health and Well-Being prescribes the disclosure of infant and adolescent deaths by organisations (United Nations, 2021). However, death can be recorded and represented in various forms of accounts. The death certificate for example, is a highly controlled document with consequences for intergenerational wealth distribution, as a narrative of responsibility, and a driver of health resourcing and policy (Grippo et al., 2013; Gamage, 2020). While the use of regulated alternative accounts as a source of data is scarce in the accounting history literature, several researchers have explored other artefacts that memorialise or provide tangible accounts of death.

Two notable papers from Miley and Read (2016b; 2017) explore memorialisation accounts of soldiers during the two World Wars. Miley and Read (2017: 23) utilise war cemeteries built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission following World War I as repositories of social accounting on a ‘grand scale’. They examine memorial inscriptions over time to consider how information about the non-monetary human cost of war is communicated as a ‘myth of war experience and the cult of the fallen’ (Miley and Read, 2017: 23). Thus, inscribing a particular way of seeing death from war.

In a similar vein, Miley and Read (2016b) present the story of prisoners of war (POWs) on the infamous Thai-Burma railroad during World War II. These POWs were given an ‘honourable’ burial or cremation by their Japanese captors with a funeral service and ‘a wooden cross etched with the serial number and name of the deceased soldier marked the grave’ because they had ‘died in the service of the emperor’ (Miley and Read, 2016b: 9 & 14). Since these gravesites were well documented and marked, years later hidden informal accounts written on pieces of bamboo revealed silences in formal Japanese accounts. For example, the harsh treatment of POWs including the confiscation of Red Cross parcels by the captors.

Therefore, alternative accounts of death can provide a rich source of data for accounting historians. Narratives of death often describe the conditions of the living and their analysis can provide insights into relationships of power, injustices and the lived experience of communities. Especially in sites where traditional forms of documentation do not exist, for example carvings, funerary artefacts and artwork. In situations where official accounts of death exist but there has been an attempt to shift the focus from who or what is accountable, such as the COVID19 pandemic or instances of genocide, alternative narratives provide visibility.

A third space - death as a business

In addition to the future research opportunities identified from the articles included in our review, we realised that a potential third research space exists for accounting studies that traverse our categories of accounts of and accounts for. Death as an explicit business or implicit profit-making enterprise are notably absent from the literature, especially since the corpse has both a symbolic and instrumental value that technical societies convert into commodities (Bogard, 2008).

The concept of necrocapitalism has emerged in the critical business lexicon as a practice in situations where violence, dispossession and death are evidenced as the ‘accumulation by dispossession and the creation of death worlds’ (Bannerjee, 2008: 1548, emphasis in original). This business of death occurs where the accrual of profits subsumes the rights of citizens, such as the extraction of resources in developing countries, the use of privatised militias, and sites of modern slavery.

One of the more obvious business opportunities of death is the final ‘send-off’. This ritualised practice has been a common feature of the human landscape since Paleolithic times (Laderman, 2003) and the business of death has a long history with the trade of undertaking established in the second half of the seventeenth century (Fritz, 1994).

The final ceremonies that accompany a corpse's disposal, as well as its preparation for these ceremonies and the manner in which it vanishes from living society, reveal a great deal about the animating cultural values and integrating social principles at work in any particular community (Laderman, 2003: xvi).

Thus, human societies reveal both cultural values and social principles through practices such as the ceremonial aspects of preparing and the manner of disposition of a corpse. The control of the dead and the related practices have considerable social implications (Laderman, 2003). Recently, this idea has been explored by Moerman and van der Laan (2021) in relation to the impact of stigmatisation surrounding a pauper's funeral and the exploitative practices of funeral insurance. The contemporary funeral insurance industry is used in many western cultures to ensure the culturally nuanced idea of a good ‘send-off’. Equally, in western society, the professional funeral director has considerable monopoly power over the death-care^xii industry as a gateway to profit (van der Laan and Moerman, 2017). However, studies of death as a business have found little favour with accounting scholars, despite large multinational corporations dominating the funeral market in the US, UK and elsewhere.

The business of death is not confined to funerary practices. The corpse is a site that makes available valuable commodities such as cadavers, tissue and organs. Initially, the illegal market for cadavers developed with the needs of anatomical scientists, giving rise to the practice of bodysnatching (Moerman and van der Laan, 2020). This history of anatomical study in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been described as an ‘intermediate enterprise in which a kit of metaphors, practices and performances…were retailed to an avid market of consumers’ (Sappol, 2018: 211). Subsequent scientific developments have led to the commonplace practice of human tissue and organ transplantation and the subsequent increase in the global business of body parts for transplantation, known as the allograft industry. As demand for allografts outstrips supply, harvesting body parts for transplantation has the potential for exploitative markets such as the ‘body bazaar’.

Accounting history scholars can contribute to our understanding of the antecedents and factors that contribute to the development of these markets and how these businesses create opportunities for profit. Especially in environments where medicalisation renders both life and death a scientific rather than social practice

Contributions, conclusions and possibilities

This review of the literature on accounting for death has demonstrated that there is no coherent or substantive approach in the accounting history literature. Since death as an empirical phenomenon is virtually absent, we also found a lack of explicit theoretical insight for death in relation to accounts for and specific accounts of death.

In the category of accounting for death, we foregrounded the way in which calculative practices were mobilised to transform death to enable a transaction through enumeration or valuation; such as the inventory-style accounting for enslaved people or the commodification of the corpse to provide specimens for anatomical schools in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This ‘market’ for corpses allowed the inscription of post-mortem or ‘ghost’ values dependent on the valuation of different attributes of the corpse (social status, age, disease etc.) and the ease of collection and transport (Berry, 2017: 3). Further examples were found in insurance schemes and mutual benefits funds which also require the financialisation of death, such as estimating the loss of productive value of a slave upon death to determine life insurance coverage. Calculative practices are ‘mechanisms around which interests are negotiated, counter claims articulated and political processes explicated’ (Burchell et al., 1980: 17) and much energy has gone into studying the impact of calculative practices on everyday life. Here we call for more work that studies the impact of calculative practices on death.

In the category of accounts of death, we foregrounded instances where death occurred as a consequence of organisational or institutional activity. We introduced the term necroaccountability to describe a phenomenon that occurs in a variety of contexts. This focus on accountability provides an opportunity for alternative framing of death and an understanding of how it relates to organisational and institutional relations. Examples of this include the recent study by Yu (2021) that frames the inscriptions of death from testimonies of COVID19 deaths as accountability for mourning; or Twyford’s (2021) use of thanatopolitics and states of exception in areas such as detention camps or demilitarised zones.

Related to accounting for death is the relationship of death to politics and economics. The notion of necrocapitalism provides an interesting framework to put death at the centre of critical accounting history studies. Whether from the simple business of ‘undertaking’ to the more complex commercial arrangements of monopolised death care, privatisation of war and profiteering from death and disaster.

This review confirms that historical studies at the intersection of death and accounting are under-developed. Therefore, this study seeks to contribute to the accounting history literature by identifying underexplored themes and avenues for future research. In particular, the opportunities from foregrounding accounting for and accounts of death as an empirical phenomenon, rather than being buried in the detail of case studies or side-lined by an interesting event or site of research. Importantly, there is much to learn about phenomenon of death and how it intersects with accounting, accountability, and the business of death in non-Anglophone settings. As Annisette (2006: 399–400) argues there are people and periods ‘untouched by accounting history’ and we need to ‘look beyond the shores of Europe and the West and our historic comfort zone’.

The scope of the article is limited to human death. Future studies could consider the death of animals, plants, the planet and other non-human living entities. In addition, we take a narrow conception of death and future studies could consider the meaning of death such as the ideas of ‘clinical death’ or ‘death care’ and their consequences in accounts for and accounts of death.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Sandra van der Laan

Notes

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