Accounting History

The roles of accountant characters in a coherent genre of entertainment media, and over time, remain surprisingly under-researched. In this study, it is argued that the roles of accountants in society can be interpreted from longitudinal analyses of the roles played by accountant characters in entertainment media narratives depicting fictional worlds. Analysis is provided of narratives in which actantial and thematic roles are played by accountants in 178 US superhero comics’ narrative sequences between 1938 and 2018. The sequences were those in which at least one character is presented as an accountant. The study reveals that accountants have increasingly been portrayed in more positive than negative roles since the beginning of the twenty-first century and have become symbolic superheroes. At the same time, this study also shows that individual accountants do not last long in these narratives, even though they have a positive role. This article shows how one genre of entertainment media has conveyed an improved image of accountants in fictional worlds, to give them progressively a place of importance comparable perhaps to the one that their professional bodies argue they occupy in modern society. Even if some negativity is still attached to the accountant, their image is progressively changing for a better one based on the roles they played because they are accountants.

A sample of editorial cartoons published following the wave of accounting scandals in the United States culminating in the collapse of Enron and the demise of the auditors Arthur Andersen LLP was examined to explore the portrayal of accounting, accountants and auditors. The nature and importance of the cartoons was also investigated. While the examination revealed what cartoonists had to say about accounting, accountants and auditing, the purpose was to ascertain the stereotypes conveyed. The cartoonists working from established preconceptions of accounting and accountants redefined and reshaped accounting stereotypes. They replaced the dull but honest image with a negative one, the fraudulent accountant. However, the image of the male accountant survived. As social critics, the cartoonists focused on the consequences on employees and stockholders but neglected to address the consequences for business institutions.

In 1983, the Canadian government established a television fund to facilitate the development of a vibrant independent production sector by investing the production of domestic entertainment in four key genres. Over the next three decades, the annual budget of the Canadian Television Fund grew from C$35 million to over C$325 million¹. In taking a stakeholder approach to explore the evolution evaluative practices at the Fund from 1983 to 2010, this study contributes to our understanding of performance measures as a networked practice. It also highlights the centrality of performance measures to multiple accountings of performance in the entertainment industry.

The article examines entertainment, arts and accounting practices of a national arts council that funds arts organisations and artists. It does so by investigating the first 25 years of annual reports of the Australian Council for the Arts (1973-1996), using media reports to triangulate the data. Set against a background of socio-political change, the study explicates the differing treatments of entertainment and the arts, as political parties come in and out of power, national policy shifts, and macro-economic changes occur. Guided by legitimacy theory, analysis of narratives and budgets as calculative practices in annual reports illustrates how the nexus between entertainment and the arts changes over time, with the emphasis or value placed on entertainment diminishing relative to the arts. We conclude that the arts council has become the ‘arts council for the performing arts’, calling into question moral, pragmatic and cognitive legitimacy of the arts council.

This study investigates the evolution of performance measures in Italian state museums, alongside the evolution of their role from preservation institutes to entertainment sites, remodelling themselves as participatory museums of the digital era. Italian autonomous state museums, and in particular four of these museums, were chosen as the main field of analysis because this category of state museums was affected the most by the move from the participatory to the entertainment model through successive reforms. Results underlined a renewed role for entertainment, which acted as a mediator between the notion of enjoyment and that of knowledge; the primary importance of the measure about the number of visitors, which assumed different nuances along the years; and the double function of digital technologies in entertaining visitors and providing new sources of measurement.

The Annual General Meetings (AGMs) of Australian Football Clubs in the 1890s were a community event. These AGMs fulfilled the role of accountability, and the dissemination of financial and non-financial information, and were intertwined with a theatrical function. The theatrical aspects of the meeting which included the stage, enthusiastic participants, eminent dignitaries, cheering, applause and audience engagement meant AGMs were also an exercise in entertainment. Through the narratives of newspapers, this article sheds new light on the interrelationships between the accountability and social roles of the AGM.

This research champions indigenous voices and epistemes in accounting history. It corrects the hegemony of the coloniser’s voice in the archive and fills the archival vacuum with indigenous voices. This research presents the case of rice accounting in Cambodia. Cambodia was devastated by half a millennium of warfare and coups destroying written archives. The archives of the French coloniser are all that survive. That archive tells the coloniser’s version of rice accounting. To challenge that version of rice accounting, this research examines the story of rice accounting found in a traditional form of Cambodian entertainment: circus performance. Circus performance is a form of archive that captures collective memory, providing an indigenous voice and episteme. This research examines how, in preserving collective memory, traditional forms of entertainment can facilitate a richer understanding of accounting history when the written indigenous archive is impaired, destroyed or has failed to recognise the indigenous voice.