Purpose – The paper aims to extend research which has sought to explain Britain’s early success as an industrial power by identifying the influence of religious doctrine of the Dissenting Protestant churches on the development of accounting practices in the factory. The concern is not with specific accounting practices but with the social and moral environment which provided the incentiv…
considerable consternation amongst the more traditional of their colleagues because of the way they have questioned many of the cherished beliefs,achievements, practices and the value of previously sanctioned accounts of accounting history. Some traditional accounting historians have therefore felt they are being goaded and ridiculed by what they see as an intolerant aberration of “real” a…
The rise of the “alternative” research or critical paradigm in accounting and its strong challenge to the entrenched hegemony of the positivist paradigm is one of the most striking features of academic accounting over the past decade. Central to much of the critical accounting research which has sought to question the legitimacy of existing institutions, distributions of power and the role…
Purpose – Thepurpose of thispaper is toexaminesixteenth century Netherlands business organisation and accounting practices, then the most advanced in Western Europe, to test Sombart’s theory that scientific double entry bookkeeping was an essential prerequisite for the development of modern capitalism and the emergence of the public corporation during the late sixteenth and early sevente…