Retheorizing accounting, writing and money with evidence from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt

Ezzamel, Mahmoud; Hoskin, Keith

doi:10.1006/cpac.2001.0500

Cited by 92 publications

(98 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Ezzamel, 2005], private exchange [cf. Ezzamel & Hoskin, 2002], business and the household [cf. Ezzamel, 2002b]'' (Ezzamel, 2009, p. 376).…”

Section: Stewardship/accountability and The Living Law Of Accountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourses surrounding the evolution of the IASB/FASB Conceptual Framework: What they reveal about the “living law” of accounting

Murphy

O'Connell

hÓgartaigh

2013

Accounting, Organizations and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Ezzamel, 2005], private exchange [cf. Ezzamel & Hoskin, 2002], business and the household [cf. Ezzamel, 2002b]'' (Ezzamel, 2009, p. 376).…”

Section: Stewardship/accountability and The Living Law Of Accountingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Discourses surrounding the evolution of the IASB/FASB Conceptual Framework: What they reveal about the “living law” of accounting

Murphy

O'Connell

hÓgartaigh

2013

Accounting, Organizations and Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…Accounting is performative and, as such, often plays a constitutive role for cooperation of the underlying society. Through history, inscriptions have been used in different cultures over different periods of time for keeping order, facilitating organising and making complex exchanges possible (Ezzamel and Hoskin 2002;Basu et al 2009;Ezzamel 2012). When it comes more explicitly to self-governed organisations, alternative accounting has been designated an important role (Jayasinge and Thomas 2014) and regular flow of information, as well as ceremonies that accounting involves, can explain why certain organising of commons survived over longer periods of time (Lana-Berasain 2017).…”

Section: Accounting As a Technology That Does Somethingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Technology as integrated into institutions: expanding the list of actors affecting institutional conditions of cooperation

Forsberg

2018

International Journal of the Commons

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study seeks to overcome the gap between institutions and technology in the literature of the commons. It emphasises the importance of inviting and testing different technologies as actors that are of importance for resolving social dilemmas. In this study, a test is carried out to see if a certain accounting technology mediates factors that facilitate the sustainable management of commons. The technology that is tested in this study regards 'notched sticks' that were used as accounting in self-governed farming villages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in upper Dalarna, Sweden, when organising 'new urban commons'. The findings are that the notched sticks did function as mediators, connected in a network that did affect several factors, or conditions, for sustainable management of commons. As such, the technology of sticks was an actor that served in mediating relations, decision-making and transparency. For example, as accounting technology the sticks did change situations with possible individual bounded rationality through the construction of social entities and methods for balancing rights and obligations. Considering how accounting technology can be integrated into institutions, this implies that awareness is needed when changing and implementing technological solutions.

show abstract

“…Nevertheless he accepts (p.8) the general view that the first writing was for counting and accounting 'as a result of commercial requirements', while noting that 'it is puzzling that in China, India and Meso-America accountancy is little in evidence in the earliest writing' that has survived. A crucial stage in conceptual development was the separation of 'naming' and 'counting' (which constitute the double role of accounting- Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002) from the original language systems that identified 'numbered collective objects', of which a few relics (such as a 'brace' meaning 'two game birds', or a 'yoke' meaning two oxen) still survive in English today (Macve, 1993). Mattessich (1994) is cited by Lu and Aiken (2004) in support of the view 'that the ancient Sumerians practiced a kind of double-entry record keeping some 5000 years ago'.…”

Section: Chinese Bookkeeping and Accounting Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mattessich's argument here is unconvincing. Arguments like this for 'ancient' examples of DEB unjustifiably extrapolate from the basic functional duality of asset (inventory) movement accounting, reciprocal debtor/creditor accounting and summarisation of detail, which are found (both from Egypt that accounting relationships pre-date writing (Ezzamel and Hoskin, 2002).…”

Section: Chinese Bookkeeping and Accounting Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Contesting the Indigenous Development of 'Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping' and its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization Before c.1850

Hoskin

Macve

2012

SSRN Journal

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract*The recent rapid growth of China's economy has reopened historical debate about the extent to which it prospered during the Míng and Qīng dynasties through developing a significant market orientation on the base of its underlying agricultural bureaucratic feudalism. As a contribution to this debate, we question here the extent to which there is justification for claims concerning the development of a concomitant and indigenous Chinese form of double-entry bookkeeping (CDEB)-seen as having developed among bankers, merchants and proto-industrialists-and for its significance within such a market economy. Given that discussion on post-medieval European accounting history indicates that there is not necessarily a direct and positive connection between the development of Italian double-entry bookkeeping (DEB) and associated practices of entity accounting, and the development from the sixteenth century of Western capitalism, we argue that caution should be exercised in drawing any analogous connection in the Chinese context. But equally we wish to raise a more foundational issue concerning the similarities and differences between the knowledge worlds within which DEB and CDEB emerged, as a means to better reading the specific historical practices and discourses of each. We therefore review the invention and dissemination of western DEB as a technology emerging within a textually and semiotically changing knowledge world in the Latin West from the twelfth century AD, and consider how the evidence for the development and use of CDEB may then be reviewed in the context of the Chinese knowledge world. As part of such a reading, we focus on tracing possible intercultural linkages between the Western and Chinese developments across the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. In this way we seek to problematise conventional 1 Visiting Professor, Essex Business School, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester CO4 3SQ, UK hoskin357@gmail.com 2 Emeritus Professor, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK R.Macve@lse.ac.uk 2 formulations of the respective significance of both DEB and CDEB, while acknowledging that, at the current moment of such transcultural historical study, the mechanisms of translation and diffusion of practices and discourses generally remain obscure and inconclusive until the era of the transformation of China's modern economy in recent decades. There remains a clear need for further research utilising primary archival sources to test the arguments developed in the existing research literatures, and here.

show abstract

Retheorizing accounting, writing and money with evidence from Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt

Cited by 92 publications

References 29 publications

Discourses surrounding the evolution of the IASB/FASB Conceptual Framework: What they reveal about the “living law” of accounting

Discourses surrounding the evolution of the IASB/FASB Conceptual Framework: What they reveal about the “living law” of accounting

Technology as integrated into institutions: expanding the list of actors affecting institutional conditions of cooperation

Contesting the Indigenous Development of 'Chinese Double-Entry Bookkeeping' and its Significance in China's Economic Institutions and Business Organization Before c.1850

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About