Accounting and the state – an introduction

Abstract

This special double issue of Accounting History presents 10 articles that were presented as conference papers at the sixth Accounting History International Conference (6AHIC) held in Wellington, New Zealand during 18-20 August 2010. The choice of a conference theme is often based on a connection with the location of the conference and/or acknowledged gaps in the literature. For the 6AHIC, both were the case. The conference venue was only a few minutes away from the heart of New Zealand government, and as noted in Nola Buhr's plenary presentation and the article included in this special issue, the New Zealand government was the first government to adopt accrual accounting for whole of government reporting. Yet more importantly the relationship between the state and accounting is under-represented in the accounting history literature (Funnell, 2007). The 10 articles in this issue of Accounting History reflect aspects of the diversity of the interaction between accounting and the state, as well as the diversity of approaches to accounting history (see Gaffikin, 2011). The articles cover topics from both the technical and the contextual perspectives. They introduce research from nine jurisdictions:

Railway systems and the ‘Universal Good of the State’: Technologies of government in the nineteenth-century Papal State

“…Governmental technologies include techniques of notation, computation and calculation along with procedures of examination and assessment or surveys and presentational forms such as tables. Calculative devices are essential to governmentality, thanks to their ability to render behaviours visible and to disseminate a new vocabulary based on numbers and ‘economic objects’ (Armstrong, 1994: 42; see also Colquhoun and Parker, 2012; Miller, 2001). Calculative devices promote ‘action at a distance’ (Latour, 1987: 215).…”

Accounting as a tool of State governance: The tutelage system of ‘Free Africans’ in Brazil between 1818 and 1864

“…Several studies offer a connection between governmental programmes and the accounting information as a technology of government (e.g. Baker and Rennie, 2012;Colquhoun and Parker, 2012;Gomes et al, 2014;Lai et al, 2012) and have presented accounting as a useful instrument in managing populations (Sánchez-Matamoros et al 2016) through the concept of action at a distance (e.g. Neu, 2000aNeu, , 2000bSargiacomo, 2008Sargiacomo, , 2009.…”

Contributing to the international accounting history movement: Integrated forums of discourse

“…It was hosted by the School of Accounting and Commercial Law, Victoria University of Wellington, and financially supported by CPA Australia. The conference theme was ‘Accounting and the State’, which resulted in the subsequent publication of a special double issue on the theme featuring 10 articles (Colquhoun and Parker, 2012). A feature of this conference was the scheduling of a panel discussion, the first of its type in the series, which featured a number of speakers on the topic ‘Does Accounting History Matter?’ A paper was subsequently prepared on the topic, which appeared in Accounting History in the following year (Gomes et al, 2011), which started the tradition of publishing conference panel papers in the journal.…”

“…28 The publication of special issue of journals, according to Eden (2010: 904), is a means of ‘adding spice to our scholarly journals’. Since the Banff conference, four thematic conference special issues have been published, including two double issues, which, respectively, feature 8, 10, 6 and 5 articles or 29 articles, in total, across the four different themes (Buhr, 2009; Colquhoun and Parker, 2012; Lai and Samkin, 2017; Sánchez-Matamoros et al, 2015). As slightly more than 21 articles, on average, were published each year in Accounting History between 2014 and 2016, these four conference special issues, therefore, have provided the equivalent of approximately 16.4 months of article content based on recent publishing patterns.…”