Revisiting the boundaries of the sacred

Abstract

This work questions whether religious organisations, whose members have common shared beliefs and sacred objectives but different levels of accounting awareness, behaved differently depending on their awareness to accounting techniques. To this aim, we have analysed the content of six rules of brotherhoods founded in the city of Seville (Spain) during the last decade of the 16 th century. We have grouped the brotherhoods according to their being (or not) linked to a guild or professional group. We can conclude that their members' familiarity with accounting, or lack thereof, can explain the dissimilar behaviour of brotherhoods in relation to accounting, but not to accountability.