Suchergebnisse

Hoskin and Macve (H&M) continue to accredit certain events in the early 1840s as enabling the creation of norm-based accounting and its use to control labor and improve productivity at the Springfield Armory (SA). Although critics have refuted H&M's interpretation of these events and reproached their use of inflated language, H&M maintain their unique perspective with undiminished fervor. This rejoinder further questions the validity of H&M's perspective of U.S. accounting history. It identifies the many conventional business historians who refute it and emphasizes that no other evidence has been presented to indicate that norm-based accounting was ever employed in the U.S. before the early 1900s. It also describes how H&M have tried to bolster their position by citing several contemporary and more critical scholars who in fact refute it. More substantively, the paper emphasizes that the core debate between H&M and their critics is not simply over the timing of particular events at SA. Rather, it centers on the nature of historical evidence and the distinction between history and historicism.

In a recent Accounting History article, Sy and Tinker (S&T) [2005] critique accounting history for its support of "archivalism" and empiricism in light of irrefutable arguments against these "antiquarian epistemes." While tempted to lambaste S&T's article as unfettered social activism rather than evidence-based historical inquiry, we focus instead on the more substantive questions S&T raise. We initially summarize their essential arguments, although some of the statements they make are contradictory in nature. We then discuss fundamental issues and genuine challenges to accounting history posed by the post-Kuhnian critique that S&T and others represent, as well as the nature and purpose of historical enquiry. We reviewed the accounting history journal articles published between 2001 and 2005 and use our findings to evaluate the broad assertions that S&T make about accounting history. We conclude that S&T's critique is unwarranted and unjust, especially when the subject matter of the most recent accounting history articles is considered.

On February 19, 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the declaration of war against Japan, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which empowered the Secretary of War to exclude "any and all persons" from designated areas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, some 120,000 civilians of Japanese descent were prohibited from living, working, or traveling on the West Coast. By October 1942, over 100,000 "evacuees" were relocated and confined to ten remote internment camps for the duration of the war.
The War Relocation Authority (WRA) administered these camps and had the responsibility to feed, house, educate, and provide employment for the evacuees. This article describes the WRA's use of accounting information and situates the role of accounting within a labor-process framework. It initially discusses labor-process theory and provides an overview of the internment episode and cooperative accounting in the U.S. It then focuses on particular accounting policies, procedures, and reports that were used by the WRA to manage enterprises, monitor internment activities, and socialize evacuees with American capitalistic values.

The paper describes the nature and role of accounting during apprenticeship – the transition period from slavery to waged labor in the British West Indies. Planters, colonial legislators, and Parliamentary leaders all feared that freed slaves would flee to open lands unless they were bound to plantations. Thus, rather than relying entirely on economic incentives to maintain viable plantations, the Abolition Act and subsequent local ordinances embodied a complex synthesis of paternalism, categorization, penalties, punishments, and social controls that were collectively intended to create a class of willing waged laborers. The primary role of accounting within this structure was to police work arrangements rather than to induce apprentices to become willing workers. This post-emancipation, pre-industrial formalization of punishment, valuation, and task systems furnish powerful insights into the extent of accountancy's role in sustaining Caribbean slave regimes.