Accounting History

This article studies assimilation and Americanisation in a British-owned accountancy firm in the American Progressive Era. Due to shortages of competent American accountants, assimilation was a major task for Price, Waterhouse & Company in the US (PWCUS) between 1890 and 1914. The process is analysed by prior qualifications and experience, social class origins, and career tenure and locations associable with PWCUS personnel. Americanisation was a response by PWCUS to anti-immigrant nativism during the Progressive Era. The process is analysed through recruitment of American accountants, acquisition of American professional qualifications and citizenship, and involvement in American professional associations. By 1914, although PWCUS had assimilated numerous immigrants with potentially useful attributes, it had achieved only partial Americanisation. At this point, the firm’s personnel consisted of an immigrant majority and an American minority. The British identity of PWCUS was accentuated by its use of British accountancy standards in American business engagements. PWCUS remained an American firm with a British persona because of its ownership, personnel and practices.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the accounting professional environment underwent major changes. This case study, largely based on oral history narratives of retired partners, focuses on KMG Kendons, a well-known and respected New Zealand national accounting firm that did not survive the 1980s. Utilising organisational change-focused theories, longitudinal archival data is used to examine how an organisation, and two competing sets of institutions within it, interact with these professional environmental changes, and then trigger significant deinstitutionalisation processes. This study also seeks to determine whether the demise of KMG Kendons might have been predicted, and thus prevented. It is argued that strong leadership, strategic direction, and a strong organisational culture and identity are critical factors in firm survival; and if these had been present at KMG Kendons, it may have survived.

This article examines the evolution of practice strategy and organizational structure at the US accounting firm Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery from its inception in 1898 through to its merger with Price Waterhouse in 1998. We focus on the interaction between the firm and its broader economic, social and political contexts as we analyze key drivers of organizational change. The accounting enterprise developed a dual strategy involving both horizontal integration and service diversification for adapting successfully to changes in markets, professional knowledge, technology and regulation. Organizational learning was fundamental to its successful evolution in scale and scope as it enabled the firm to develop strategies and structures that responded effectively to changing external challenges and opportunities.

This article examines developments in the history of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) and its predecessor professional bodies, in an attempt to shed fresh light on the means by which the Institute has attained the position of considerable power, repute and international influence that it occupies today. It shows that, over its history, ICAS has been responsible for creating and maintaining a discourse, in a Foucauldian sense, which has asserted the superiority of the CA qualification over other professional accounting qualifications both nationally and internationally. It is argued that this discourse first arose out of a crisis facing the Institute’s predecessor bodies in 1853, continuing afterwards and then reappearing at further pivotal points in the Institute’s history. The study utilizes the Foucauldian concepts of discourse, power/knowledge, discontinuity and exclusion in its arguments, showing how these relate to fluctuations in the, at times, parallel discourse concerning Scots national identity that has also been in circulation, concluding with an evaluation of the usefulness of a Foucauldian approach.

The purpose of this article is to present a comparative analysis of the development of the auditing profession in the United Kingdom and France. Although legal requirements for external audits of company financial statements provided an opportunity for the development of an auditing profession as early as the mid-nineteenth century, differences in the role and status of professions led to differences in the development of the auditing profession in these two countries. It is only in recent years that there have been significant efforts to harmonize the regulatory structures for the auditing profession on a more international basis. The primary argument of this article is that historical differences in the ways that auditing has developed in different countries are significant and that international harmonization of the regulation of the auditing profession may be difficult to achieve without understanding these differences.

The distinctive Indian caste system divides Hindu society into a hierarchy of four varnas, each of which also has a traditional association with particular categories of occupations. This exploratory study examines the interplay between varna and the emergent organised accounting profession in India. Using the earliest available membership list of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) – being 1953, just four years after the organisation’s formation – a comprehensive classification of the caste status of the Hindu membership was undertaken. Among other findings, this revealed a significant over-representation of the Brahman upper caste relative to this caste’s presence in the general population. This Brahman presence is posited as having endowed a status to the accounting occupation that aided the replication in India of the British model of professional organisation. However, it also meant that the formation of the ICAI would predominantly benefit an already privileged social stratum and contribute to perpetuating traditional caste hierarchies within the modern occupation of professional accounting.

This article chronicles the history of the Controller Verein, the professional association of German-speaking controllers, from 1975 to 1989. The association was founded by alumni and trainers of the Controller Akademie, the first institute for advanced studies of controlling in Germany. The article connects the development of the association to the concept of professionalisation of accounting, thereby analysing the path of an association that differs from its Anglo-American counterparts. We used data from the archives of the association, personal archives and conducted more than 20 interviews with protagonists from the association and its institutional context. The article shows how the association has experienced the tension between being an informal club and becoming the primary professional association for controllers in German-speaking countries. However, the results of this study indicate that, due to external circumstances and individual preferences, the original club character dominated the association in the period under investigation.

This article analyses the opportunities and incentives of 32 accountants, resident in four very different parts of the British Empire (Scotland, Ireland, India and Australia), to import an English accountancy qualification in the late 1870s and become in 1880 the first “English” chartered accountants outside England and Wales (EW). This “export” and “import” of qualifications is one way in which professional accountancy has spread around the world since the late nineteenth century. The opportunities arose as the Society of Accountants in England (SAIE), set up in London in 1872, challenged the prevailing localism and exclusivism, and as attitudes in EW towards the concept of “Englishness” within the UK and the Empire changed. From 1875 the SAIE opened its membership to accountants within the Empire outside EW. The incentives of these accountants to join the SAIE depended on whether or not a body already existed in their own locality, how exclusive the body was, and its status in comparison with an English qualification. The paper concludes with a study of the varied impact of the 32 on accountancy globally.

The global expansion of knowledge is one manifestation of the multi-dimensional phenomenon called globalisation. The “globalisation paradox” was recently used in an analysis of the impact of globalisation on the transfer of professional qualifications (Annisette and Trivedi, 2013). Here it is argued that earlier manifestations could be observed in the accounting realm. The globalisation of accounting knowledge led to intra-professional rivalry and the implementation of closure strategies in the periphery of the British Empire. Earlier literature explains such professionalisation activities in South Africa as the responses by non-British inhabitants. Further literature on post-independence states alludes to local challenges to the settlement and control of the accountancy market by British accountants. This article shows how, in the emerging “South African” market for accounting knowledge, rivalry between accountants from different British accounting bodies shaped the professionalization project in the local context. New archival material is used to reveal how the global expansion of accounting knowledge generated strategies to monopolise market access.

Using a new institutional economics perspective, this article analyses the economic and political context that led to accounting standardisation in Portugal from 1977 onwards and to the recent adoption of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). The process of accounting standardisation was related to the tax reform of 1963. Additionally, evidence was found that there were also political pressures related to the need to improve the national systems of accounts. The lack of development of the accounting profession and the emphasis on legality substantiated the need for enforcement in the law in 1977 of a standardised accounting plan that was similar to other plans in Europe, namely the French Plan. In a legalist country like Portugal, the modelling of national standards on the international ones and the definitive adoption of adapted IFRS in 2010 by unlisted companies had to be complemented by the enactment in law of the accounting regulations.

This study contributes to the accounting literature on professionalization projects and is specifically located in the literature on projects in the British Empire. The study investigates the case of Kuwait, which was a British protectorate (neither settler nor non-settler) from 1899 to 1961. It deploys the enabling factors identified by Poullaos and Sian (2010) in professionalization projects in former British colonies to explore whether these factors were present in Kuwait as an Arabic British protectorate. The study also explores the role of the state in facilitating the creation of indigenous accountants and the Kuwaiti Association of Accountants and Auditors (KAAA). An outline of the Dewaniya, a distinctive aspect of Kuwaiti culture, is provided to help explain the motivation for the creation of the KAAA in 1973. This study finds that the nature of the protectorate treaty and the rise of Arabic nationalism movements led to minimal British imperial influence on Kuwait’s accounting profession, and to a greater reliance on Arabic laws and accountants. The data to support this study’s interpretation of events were obtained from semi-structured interviews with founders of the KAAA and a pioneer professional accountant, and from surviving archival records.