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The paper focuses on accounting for slave workers during one of the most morally culpable periods in Western civilization and is concerned with issues central to labor – modes of production, labor control, and labor productivity. It incorporates secondary sources and examination of records from over 150 different US and BWI plantations to identify contextual factors that motivated planters to organize their workforce in a particular way. The paper specifically describes the ganging and tasking methods of extracting surplus value and indicates how these methods fit within three common paradigmatic interpretations of accounting history – labor process, power/knowledge/discipline, and economic rationalism. In summary, ganging exemplified a pre‐modern approach to organizing labor in which planters relied primarily on physical power to compel work effort and increase output. Tasking incorporated individual work rates and included more sophisticated practices of surveillance, measurement, normalization, and socialization. Tasking became economically rational by responding to changing market conditions and by incorporating procedures and incentives to spur greater productivity. Therefore, tasking may be perceived as a thematic precursor to accounting‐based disciplinary controls like standard costing and a transitionary element from pre‐modern to modern control systems.

Accounting history has a long tradition, but in recent years it has expanded its interests and approaches. Early literature of accounting history that sought to glorify the practice of accounting and the status of accountants has been supplemented first by a more utilitarian approach viewing the past as a “database” for enhancing understanding of contemporary practice and for identifying past accounting solutions that might be relevant to current problems, and then by a more critical approach, which seeks to understand accounting’s past through the perspective of a range of social and political theories. A tension has developed between those historians whose first loyalty is to the archive and those who look primarily to theory to inform their historical investigations. As accounting history matures, open debate between practitioners of different modes of history making can only be beneficial, not only to the development of the discipline, but also towards our own self‐understandings as accountants, including the impact we have on organizational and social functioning. Suggests that accounting history without a firm archival base is likely to lose direction, but that our notion of what constitutes the archive, and our ways of communicating, explicating and interpreting the archive, should not be taken as fixed. To illustrate this, examines a number of approaches to the writing of accounting history where recent research has begun to demonstrate a critical and interpretive tendency, and suggests directions in which this research might develop as accounting and its history enters the twenty‐first century.

WE seem to be immediately facing a drive for much more technical education and for many more technical colleges and schools to produce it. In the condition of the world today this is an inevitable, an indispensable, process. The reasons are loudly proclaimed and patent to every librarian, and the library must come strongly, as it always has, into the picture but perhaps now more universally and with greater intensity. Dr. Chandler, who is proceeding at a rare pace to specialize his departments, has created a new local council to unify the information work that has already been done at Liverpool. Every technical book costing over five shillings is bought, and the usual collections of periodicals and other material of technical and industrial interest are being increased and a bulletin of additions is being issued soon after the end of each month. The Technical library is one that combines lending and reference activities, telephone and postal services; in fact all the orthodox activities that have been standard in the larger towns since Glasgow began them in 1916, and possibly new and extended ones. The William Brown Library which was destroyed in Air Raids is being reconstructed and the enlarged Technical Library will be developed in it. This is one city only; every large city reports some increase in the services rendered, for example the Telex service is now available at Manchester. It is essential that public libraries everywhere realize the part they may play; if they do not, the suggestion made recently that the lending of technical books should become an activity of the Technical Colleges may become a reality.

This paper seeks to map the employment of female professionals to create a collective biography of women in US public relations from 1940‐1970. It aims to suggest that women were active leaders in many areas of public relations, despite the exclusion of women from most historical accounts.

The author completed a content analysis of a women's professional directory published in 1970. This directory summarizes women's accomplishments during this critical time period in the development of the public relations profession. The sample of 520 entries was analyzed for demographics and career statistics in relation to social perceptions that prevailed during this timeframe.

The paper offers empirical insights into the work of female public relations practitioners. It quantifies employment in managerial and technical positions in a variety of industries, charts the trends in employment, and offers support for theoretical explanations for why women were essentially invisible in public relations publications and historical records.

The findings from this research are limited in that they are based on a directory full of self‐reported success stories. Therefore, additional research is needed before these results can be generalized to the population under study.

This paper creates a collective biography of women in public relations that complements the research that has been done on a few individual women. This research contributes to a more robust explanation of the development of US public relations.

The use of accounting to help apply the principles of scientific management to business affairs is associated with the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control. This first British industry‐based study of the implementation of these calculative techniques makes use of the case study research tool to interrogate archival data relating to leading iron and steel companies. We demonstrate the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control early on (during the inter‐war period) by a single economic unit, United Steel Companies Ltd, where innovation is attributed to the engineering and scientific background and US experiences of key personnel. Elsewhere, significant management accounting change occurred only with the collapse in iron and steel corporate profitability that began to become apparent in the late 1950s. The process of accounting change is addressed and the significance for our study of the notions of evolution and historical discontinuity is examined. The paper is contextualised through an assessment of initiatives from industry‐based regulatory bodies and consideration of the economic circumstances and business conditions within which management accounting practices were the subject of radical revision.

Despite the existence of a variety of approaches to the understanding of behavioral and managerial ethics in organizations and business relationships generally, knowledge of organizing systems for fidelity remains in its infancy. We use halakha, or Jewish law, as a model, together with the literature in sociology, economic anthropology, and economics on what it termed “middleman minorities,” and on what we have termed the Landa Problem, the problem of identifying a trustworthy economic exchange partner, to explore this issue.

The article contrasts the differing explanations for trustworthy behavior in these literatures, focusing on the widely referenced work of Avner Greif on the Jewish Maghribi merchants of the eleventh century. We challenge Greif’s argument that cheating among the Magribi was managed chiefly via a rational, self-interested reputational sanctioning system in the closed group of traders. Greif largely ignores a more compelling if potentially complementary argument, which we believe also finds support among the documentary evidence of the Cairo Geniza as reported by Goitein: that the behavior of the Maghribi reflected their deep beliefs and commitment to Jewish law, halakha.

Applying insights from this analysis, we present an explicit theory of heroic marginality, the production of extreme precautionary behaviors to ensure service to the principal.

Generalizing from the case of halakha, the article proposes the construct of a deep code, identifying five defining characteristics of such a code, and suggests that deep codes may act as facilitators of compliance. We also offer speculation on design features employing deep codes that may increase the likelihood of production of behaviors consistent with terminal values of the community.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the labour contract system (LCS) established by the Freedmen’s Bureau after the American Civil War to normalise relations between freed-slaves and their former masters and to uphold their rights as free citizens. In particular, it explains the lack of accountability of employers under the LCS and how this contributed to the system’s failure.

The paper adopts an archive-based approach to develop and illustrate the labour contracting relationship between freed-persons and property owners and the role accounting played in sustaining this relationship in the immediate post-bellum period.

The paper finds that the LCS was coercive compared to contemporary business practice in the USA; did not conform to the high ideals of contracting as portrayed by the abolition movement; and was adopted by default rather than design. In the event, the reluctance of the federal government to infringe individual autonomy by imposing an over-arching system of regulation to hold employers to account for upholding their contractual obligations prevailed over the desire to defend the freed-people’s property rights.

This research examines the relationship between labour contracting and property rights as well as the role of accounting in sustaining racial prejudice against freed-persons after the American Civil War. As in many archive-based studies, illustrations are selective and not randomised.

The paper examines the various accountings and accountabilities within the LCS in the context of the underlying ideological tensions and priorities in post-conflict US society.

This paper seeks to extend the development of the historical accounting research agenda further into the area of popular culture. The work examines the discourses that surrounded the drinking of alcohol in nineteenth century Britain and explores how an accounting failure disrupted the tension between the two established competing discourses, leading to a significant impact on UK drinking culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

The paper employs both primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources are used to develop the main themes of the discourses deployed by the temperance societies and the whisky companies. Primary sources derived from the contemporary press are employed, as necessary, in support.

The paper demonstrates that accounting, although it may not be central to a discourse or other social structure, can still have a profound impact upon cultural practices. The potential for research into culture and accounting should not therefore be dismissed if no immediate or concrete relationship between culture and accounting can be determined. Further support is provided for studies that seek to expand the accounting research agenda into new territories.

The study of popular culture is relatively novel in accounting research. This paper seeks to add to this research by exploring an area of cultural activity that has hitherto been neglected by researchers, i.e. by exploring how an accounting incident impacted upon the historical consumption of Scotch whisky in the UK.

Investigates the dimensions of accounting information prepared for use in managing non‐corporate pastoral entities in pre‐Federation Western Victoria and the local, time‐specific environmental factors which shaped these dimensions. Based on examinations of 23 sets of surviving business records prepared during 1836‐1900, provides evidence of the structure and usage of pastoral accounting information in an unregulated financial reporting environment. Draws conclusions about the likely impact of cultural, legal and political, professional, educational, economic and other factors as key explanatory variables. Also argues a case for lost relevance based on the evidence of accounting change in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.