Editorial

Welcome to the May issue of Accounting History for 2024. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the following people for their contributions to and ongoing support of the journal who, for various reasons, have chosen not to continue as editorial board members: Frances M. Miley and Andrew Read. This issue also contains a list of ad hoc manuscript reviewers for 2023. The editors gratefully acknowledge their assistance.

It is our pleasure to advise that the 2023 Robert W. Gibson Manuscript Award winning article will be announced mid-year and awarded during the upcoming 2024 Accounting and Finance Association of Australian and New Zealand (AFAANZ) conference dinner in July.

This May issue includes five full articles along with the call for proposals for the Emerging Scholars’ Colloquium (AHIESC) of the Twelfth Accounting History International Conference (12AHIC). The latter is being held in Siena, Italy from 4 to 6 September 2024. We would encourage you to examine this opportunity and to contact the AHIESC Chair – Carolyn Fowler (carolyn.fowler@vuw.ac.nz) if you need further information or clarification. The call for papers for the 12AHIC as per the February issue is now closed, and notification of acceptance for inclusion in the conference programme will be made by 10 June. We would encourage you to check the website for any further details about the 12AHIC: https://www.congressi.unisi.it/12ahic/.

Authors drawn from Australia, Italy, Romania, Saudi Arabia, and the US have written for this issue, with articles covering specifically the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The variety of topics considered in this issue reflects the breadth of the accounting history debate, which spans from the university system's commercialisation to the professionalisation of accountants, and from the diffusion of accounting ideas and practice to the rhetorical and ideological power of accounting books, ending with accounting for slavery. The common thread of this variety of topics is the analytical identification of how accounting can be used for either the ‘good’ or the ‘bad’: to promote social change or to reinforce morally and ethically questionable behaviours and practices. While critical perspectives are combined with interpretative approaches, this issue of Accounting History allows for a close appreciation of accounting's flexibility and adaptability to equally represent and reinforce both sides of historical events. In that light, these articles provide food for thought and relevant lessons for today's role of accounting in society.

The issue begins with an article by Lee D. Parker, James Guthrie and Ann Martin-Sardesai entitled ‘Performance management in the Australian higher education system – A historically informed critique’ that adds to the highly debated use of neoliberalism and New Public Management (NPM) practices in the Australian higher education system. The authors have widely contributed throughout their own careers and long-standing research interests to this debate, spanning from the early 1980s to the present day. In this work, they dig into their extensive knowledge and experience to critically evaluate the evolution of the Australian higher education system. They recall and analyse the main Australian reforms on national higher education, such as the Dawkins reforms and the Hoare Review, the introduction of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) on learning and teaching, and the government funding scheme on higher education. They also consider the role of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in providing research funding and research policy advice to the government, before illustrating the impact of the most recent NPM arrangements and practices, including the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) framework. The authors provide a comprehensive picture of the metrics, audits, control systems, performances, and accountability rhetoric, which have historically emerged and purposefully been implemented to foster mass delivery education, commercialisation of the research outputs and education outcomes, based on a progressive business competitive agenda. They conclude by pointing out the change of the original social role and identity of the university, and at the redesign of the power relations among its main stakeholders. The authors describe the new Australian university system as a fully corporatised system, pursuing a self-interested financial bottom line.

Martin Persson provides us with a systematic investigation of the American Institute of Accountants’ development of aptitude testing in the 1940s, in the second article in this issue titled ‘The American Institute of Accountants’ aptitude testing experiment in the 1940s: An initiative to increase the supply of able accountants’. This article draws on Abbot's system of professions as a theoretical framework, and on three US archives as primary sources of historical materials, comprising personal correspondence, minutes from meetings and internal memos from the American Institute of Accountants in relation to the Committee on Selection of Personnel (mostly represented by Littleton in the article, the only academic of the Committee). Abbot's framework defines professions as exclusive occupational groups that each possess their own set of abstract knowledge. The article indicates that the university system plays a role, alongside other external forces, in shaping the cultural environment and development of professions, in terms of pursuing inter-professional competition over graduates. Based on this framework, the article continues to depict the professional dominance of certain groups within accountancy and the progressive consolidation of the American accounting profession with respect to the Scottish and British accountants who emigrated to the US. The aptitude testing experiment develops measures and procedures to show the individual possession of personal qualities and technical abilities indicating a successful career in accounting, in line with the ideal characteristics of an American accounting professional. In doing so, the author illustrates the collaboration between the Educational Records Bureau (represented by Wood) and the Committee on Selection of Personnel to devise an original battery of three tests on achievement, orientation, and professional interest to persuade suitable individuals (college graduates) to pursue a career in public accounting. The University of Illinois was chosen for the initial test run of these aptitude tests in 1946, with the vision of extending them nationally. Despite the successful test run and these intentions, the article identifies a final fall of the national aptitude testing due to legitimacy problems within the Committee on Selection of Personnel, namely the lack of legitimacy of the New York-based accounting practitioners in the Committee, the higher education institutions’ unwillingness to contribute to the project by paying the related testing fees, the resurgence of candidates, composed by women entering the profession to fill labour shortages during WWII and the eventual return of servicemen from the war.

The third article by Adalberto Rangone, Liliana Ionescu-Felega, Mariana Bunea and Massimo Sargiacomo entitled ‘The contribution of Grigore L. Trancu-Iasi to the evolution of accounting theory, practice and profession in Romania’ depicts, instead, a successful knowledge transfer in the accounting discipline between Italy and Romania. The authors outline that the socio-economic situation of Romania at the beginning of the 1900s allows us to understand how context facilitates such knowledge transfer. The authors refer to a major economic crisis in 1899–1901 Romania, which pushed the government to promote an increasing nationalisation of specific economic activities, while small private business initiatives require the adoption of more innovative accounting principles to access the necessary funding from the main credit institutions. Meanwhile, the article indicates that accountants did not have a specific professional order in Romania at the time, like lawyers and engineers, and those carrying on trading and commercial activities were not required to have accounting knowledge or undertake rigorous bookkeeping. In turn, weak regulation on bankruptcy opened the opportunity for criminals to benefit from the situation, devising hasty or criminal bookkeeping methods and escaping fraudulent bankruptcy. In this context, the academic and political figure of Trancu-Iasi demonstrates an outstanding effort to eradicate fraudulent bankruptcy by promoting an accounting framework where ‘red flags’ for bankruptcy could be raised beforehand, through the analysis of different aspects of bookkeeping, such as the presence of specific accounting books, the check of specific variations in the accounts, the internal auditing and analysis of the balance sheets. From the analysis of a wide range of material published by Trancu-Iasi on accounting, business and financial topics, the authors analytically reconstruct his thoughts and efforts against fraudulent bankruptcy. In doing so, the authors further recognise and pinpoint theoretical accounting aspects, which were originally developed in the Italian context. By assuming a network of communication, intellectual debate and transfer of ideas and concepts among academics at a supra-national level, they provide an overview of the spread of the main Italian accounting concepts, specifically elaborated through various Italian schools of thought, within the Romanian higher education and professional context, thanks to the work of Trancu-Iasi.

The next article by Lee Moerman and Sandra van der Laan titled ‘Chaos and comedy: The narrative of Samuel Turner III’ also refers to the spread of ideas and ideologies in Britain after WWI, in a context of weak regulation. While in the early 1900s Britain was a prosperous and urban nation, its place as a global industrial power seems to be in decline, due to the failure of British industrialists to adopt new developments in production techniques. Due to protectionist policies at the beginning of WWI, the cotton export trade collapsed but tariffs remained in place till after WWI. Social changes, like the women's movement, and the substitution of traditional family businesses with large corporations also characterise this context. Samuel Turner III is an industrialist, coming from a well-known British industrialist family producing asbestos products for the war efforts. Just before, during and after WWI, the absence of a national and global free market required new methods to accurately cost contracts and prevent profiteering. Britain looks to the American emergence of principles of scientific management and uniform accounting systems to fill in that gap. However, the authors demonstrate how the perspective of an industrialist may differ significantly from that of an accountant, using the framework of narrative historiography and a comedic plot. They pay attention to the two books of Turner III and related materials originally distributed as pamphlets, dinner speeches and newspaper articles, which are referred to as the ‘social media of the day’ to illustrate the ideology of Turner III. They identify that the businessman is presented as the comedic hero, reconciling the competing tensions between capital and labour through the category of ‘profit’. They also indicate that Turner III ascribes the cause of the chaos and confusion of WWI to the lack of conciliation between capital and labour, fuelled by the women's movement. In Turner III's narrative, the policies proposed by the political left, labour and trade unions are held up as inefficient and obstructing elements to the efforts of the (businessman) hero. Turner III also proposes a withdrawal of the State from industry. In the various representations of ‘profit’ (social, production and investment profit) and its relationship with capital and labour, this category is persistently represented as the basis on which Britain will return to be the workshop of the world.

In the final article of Daniel Tinkelman on ‘Money does not stink – Accounting and slavery’ a supplemental focus is provided to institutions and practices that supported an ideological stance: American slavery. The author systematically analyses how accounting neutralises ethical and moral issues by encapsulating and normalising them into accounting items and categories, such as agency problems, financial language, and categories (investment, assets, loan collateral and similar terms). The author explains how accounting can operate such neutralisation and normalisation not only through terminology, but also by considering that it is performed on behalf of those in power, and in this specific context, to protect the interests of the enslavers rather than representing the conditions of the enslaved people. Moreover, the usage of accounting practices contributes to business growth by facilitating the financing and operation of the slave trade business and slave plantations. This article is based on an extensive, although not comprehensive, literature review of articles on the broad subjects of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade and accounting, with a focus on extracting examples suitable for an audience of students and faculty without prior exposure to the topic. While various justifications for slavery, such as racism, desire for dominance, source of higher tax collection for governments, and specific laws and regulations favouring slavery are depicted as playing a significant role in perpetuating this practice, accounting appears to be an essential tool in both servicing the triangle slave trade and managing the plantations, where an agency issue manifests. In the first case, the issue of agency is referred to in the article, with the example of the asiento (or monopoly to sell African slaves to the American colonies) and it is related to the potentially detrimental behaviour of the ship captain and crew for the owner's profit since they are sailing and trading without the direct owner's oversight. For these reasons, reports are required, and incentives are modelled to make the voyage profitable for the owner. The required standard unit of measure of enslaved people, who can have different ages, genders, and health conditions, treats human beings as commodities and allows business contracts to be set and executed. In the case of plantations, the agency issue emerges when their management is assigned to local people (plantation attorneys) while the absentee owners prefer to live in Europe. In this case, reports are also required, with accounting productivity records used to make the attorneys accountable, and commissions, based on the total value of the yearly crops, are designed to incentivise the attorneys to look after the interests of the absentees. If slaves are ‘inventory’ for the slave traders, they are considered a ‘productive asset’ for the plantation owners in which they are employed in the Americas. This labour force can be encapsulated again through specific accounting labour productivity measures, such as harvest data, daily picking totals, and modes of labour organisation. The author concludes his work by reinforcing the connection between historical slavery and the issue of modern slavery.

Enjoy the May 2024 issue.