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Accounting history and accounting progress

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Accounting history and accounting progress

Christopher J. Napier
Accounting History 2001 6: 7
DOI: 10.1177/103237320100600202

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Accounting history and
accounting progress
Christopher J. Napier
University of Southampton

Abstract
The “new” accounting historians that emerged from the mid-1980s
characterised their predecessors as relying heavily on a view of
accounting as progressive and accounting change as evolutionary.
From a social science perspective, progress is a problematic concept, as
it implies not just change but also improvement, and thus seems to imply
the making of a value judgement. As accounting has become an object
of study less as a technical and more as a social phenomenon, consensus
as to what constitutes an improvement becomes harder to secure.
However, from a perspective grounded in historiography, this paper
reviews the use of a concept of progress in the writing of history from
the eighteenth century, and analyses its use, together with that of a
concept of evolution, in “traditional” accounting history. Appealing to
recent developments in the understanding of the role of narrative in
history, the paper suggests that the use of narratives of accounting
progress should not be ruled out on a priori grounds.

Keywords: history; accounting history; progress; evolution; narrative.

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Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented as a plenary address at the second Accounting
History International Conference, Osaka, Japan, 8-10 August 2001, and the author would like to thank those
attending the conference for their valuable comments. The author is grateful to Garry Carnegie and an
anonymous reviewer for detailed suggestions for improvement; any remaining errors remain his own
responsibility.

Address for correspondence:

Christopher J. Napier
School of Management
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0) 23 8059 5318
Facsimile: +44 (0) 23 8059 3844
Email: cjn@socsci.soton.ac.uk

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

1. Introduction

Anthony Hopwood, in his critique of historical accounting research “The

Archaeology of Accounting Systems” (1987), characterised most of the historical
studies in the field published by the mid-1980s as having “adopted a rather
technical perspective delineating the residues of the accounting past rather than
more actively probing into the underlying processes and forces at work”
(Hopwood, 1987, p.207). As Hopwood perceives it, “accounting has more
frequently been seen as becoming what it should be. A teleological trajectory of
development has provided a basis for understanding changes in the accounting
craft. ... [A] relatively unproblematic progressive and functionalist interest has been
imposed all too readily on the residues of the accounting past” (Hopwood, 1987,
p.206).
Although Hopwood gives few specific references to justify this criticism, a
progressivist tendency can indeed be detected in central works of historical
accounting research. For example, in his pioneering history Accounting Evolution
to 1900, A.C. Littleton describes accounting in the following terms:
Accounting is relative and progressive. The phenomena which form its subject
matter are constantly changing. Older methods become less effective under
altered conditions; earlier ideas become irrelevant in the face of new problems.
Thus surrounding conditions generate fresh ideas and stimulate the ingenious
to devise new methods. And as such ideas and methods prove successful they
in turn begin to modify the surrounding conditions. The result we call progress
(Littleton, 1933, p.361).

Littleton does not make specific what he means by “progress”, although he implies
that it lies in the ability of accounting to solve present-day problems. Littleton notes
that accounting has not been static, and points to the growth in professional audits
and the expansion of cost accounting as evidence of how accounting helps to solve
emerging problems of business planning and control. He claims to show how
“accounting originated in known circumstances in response to known needs; it has
evolved and grown in harmony with its surroundings; its changes can be explained
in terms of forces current at the time” (Littleton, 1933, p.362). Littleton’s
historiography is a dynamic one: accounting “came from definite causes; it moves
toward a definite destiny” (Littleton, 1933, p.362).
This last statement appears to support Hopwood’s accusation that the view of
accounting history adopted by historians such as Littleton seems to embody a
teleology: a belief that accounting has some ultimate end to which it is tending. The
path to this ultimate end may not be a direct one, suggesting that accounting
changes could be assessed by the extent to which they work towards the ultimate
end (they would in that sense be “progressive”) or move away from the end (they
would in that sense be “regressive”). But even if we believe that accounting has
some ultimate end, what could it be? In my own studies of accounting’s history, I

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Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

have passed through various stages from an initial idealism, ready to believe that
accounting can and does change for the better, to a more sceptical position, unsure
whether it makes sense to describe accounting as “progressive” and to talk of
“accounting progress” at all.
This paper is therefore an attempt to explore what might be meant by
describing accounting as “progressive”. I shall undertake this exploration by
considering what roles a notion of progress might play in historical research more
generally and historical accounting research more particularly. This requires a
review of the extent to which accounting historians have in the past appealed to
notions of progress. Although there is some evidence of the use of progress as an
organising concept in so-called “traditional accounting history”, it tends to be
associated with the highly ambiguous notion of evolution. The emphasis placed on
evolution as a term describing accounting’s patterns of change has been criticised
by the so-called “new accounting history” (Miller et al., 1991; Miller & Napier,
1993). As Keenan (1998) has pointed out, this criticism may itself be open to
question as presupposing a rather specific and potentially confused understanding
of the concept of evolution. Nervousness about describing accounting change as
“progressive” may owe more to the fact that many historical accounting researchers
(particularly those working within the “new accounting history” approach) come
from social science backgrounds, where claims that evidence reveals a pattern of
improvement over time might be held to be inappropriate value judgements.
However, historians of accounting are increasingly aware that social science
values are not the only ones appropriate for the study of how accounting has
manifested itself, changed and developed through the past (see, for example, Mills,
1993; Fleischman et al., 1996; Parker, 1999). Historical accounting researchers of
both the “traditional” and “new” varieties have, as Parker (1999, p.17), notes, been
“firmly embedded in the qualitative research methodology tradition”, and even
those leaning more towards social science have been suspicious of positivist
research for its tendency to explain and predict complex human behaviour in terms
of a limited number of factors. More recently, there has been a greater
consciousness that modes of historical writing are neither neutral nor “mere”
rhetoric, but that different forms of narrative are themselves constitutive of the
histories that they tell (Funnell, 1998). From this point of view, narrative forms are
not inherently good or bad, rather they are effective or ineffective in persuading the
intended audience of the cogency of the story being narrated. Telling a story in
terms of progress is often a persuasive and thus an effective way of structuring a
small-scale historical narrative. This is so whether we describe a “success” in
which accounting, or something affected by accounting, is held to improve, or a
“failure” from which we hope to learn lessons to help us avoid mistakes in the
future. On a larger scale, where accounting as a whole becomes the subject matter
of our histories, it may be more difficult to tell a story of progress, as we seem to

10
 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

face a choice between the equally unattractive options of regarding accounting as

eternally changing in a generally improving direction or as tending towards its end.

Progress in history and history as progress

A dictionary definition of progress is: “An advance to something better or higher in

development” (Chambers English Dictionary, 1990, p.1168). This definition brings
out the two central aspects of progress. First, it is a dynamic concept: a necessary
condition for progress is that there should be some change. However, change is not
a sufficient condition: the change must be a change for the better. Progress can be
seen as a process of more-or-less continuous improvement, and may in addition be
regarded as progress towards some goal or end. Thus the philosopher Robert
Solomon (1995, p.722) defines progress as “improvement over time, especially the
gradual perfection of humanity”. A strong belief in progress is often seen as
characteristic of the eighteenth century Enlightenment in Europe. This is
exemplified by such writers as the Marquis de Condorcet, who in the middle of the
French Revolution set out his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind (Condorcet, 1955). An enlightenment view of history as universal
progress was expressed by Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, where he drew “the pleasing conclusion that every age of the world has
increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and
perhaps the virtue, of the human race” (quoted in Carr, 1964, p.111).1
As a philosophical idea, progress is particularly associated with Kant and
Hegel. In his essay “An Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of
View”, written in 1784, Kant proposed that:
The history of the human race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of
a hidden plan of nature to bring about an internally – and for this purpose also
externally – perfect political constitution as the only possible state within
which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely (quoted
in Burns and Rayment-Pickard, 2000, p.55).

The view of Kant that humanity’s history is a movement towards some ideal state
was developed by Hegel, who saw progress as being achieved through conflict
between and within ideas and political systems. These would fall apart through
their internal contradictions and be replaced by higher forms through a dialectical
process. Ultimately humanity would reach a form that contained no internal
contradictions: what many writers, most notably Francis Fukuyama (1992), have
referred to as “the end of history”.
Hegel’s view of a “universal history” had many unattractive features, as he
considered that:
The History of the World occupies a higher ground than that on which morality
has properly its position. ... What the absolute aim of Spirit requires and

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Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

accomplishes – what Providence sees – transcends the obligations and liability

to imputation and the ascription of good or bad motives, which attach to
individuality in virtue of its social relations. ... Moral claims that are irrelevant
must not be brought into collision with world-historical deeds and their
accomplishment (Hegel, 1956, pp.66-7).

As filtered through Marx and then later both Fascism and Communism, this
philosophy that history overrode morality was to provide a justification for many
subsequent acts of brutality (Fukuyama, 1992, p.69). However, the implication that
progress was inevitable was to appear in a more benign light in nineteenth century
Britain, where rapid social and economic change could be made to seem less
threatening by locating contemporary developments within a broader narrative of
progress and, as the nineteenth century unfolded, a story of evolution.
In his study of the Victorians’ relationship with the past, The Invention of
Progress (1989), Bowler notes how narratives of evolution emerged not only in
historical writings but also in a wide range of contexts, and suggests that evolution
provided “a general progressive scheme designed to create order out of chaos”
(Bowler, 1989, p.5). Belief in progress was a badge of optimism about the present
and the future. Much general historical writing in the nineteenth century, at least in
Britain, reflected this optimism, seeing history as a gradual movement towards
contemporary British society, with past institutions and practices being interpreted
as primitive precursors of those found in the more developed present. This
approach to historical writing was subsequently to be described by Herbert
Butterfield (1931) as “Whig History”. Historians would identify the favourable
factors that allowed Britain to develop in the fortunate ways that it did, while social
scientists could elucidate the underlying laws of progress in society, which might
be expected to turn out to be a generalisation of the Whig interpretation of history
(Bowler, 1989, p.27).
After World War I, the optimism that had supported a general notion of
progress tended to be replaced by a more pessimistic viewpoint. In his study The
Idea of Progress, first published in 1920, J.B. Bury tried to uphold the value of
progress as “the animating and controlling idea of western civilisation” (Bury,
1920, p.viii), but could not entirely sustain an optimistic outlook. Oswald
Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926) saw in human history not a continuous
trend of improvement but rather a recurrence of cycles of growth and decay.
Civilisations had a beginning, a middle and an end. While there are echoes here of
Hegel’s dialectic, to Spengler it was less clear that the succeeding civilisations
embodied a pattern of constant improvement. Indeed, it might make little sense to
compare, for example, the world of classical Greece and Rome with the age of
medieval Christianity or the European Enlightenment. Not only could we expect
any individual civilisation ultimately to decline, but we would have no rational
basis for considering its replacement as better or worse than what went before.

12
 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

The argument that different civilisations could not be ranked meaningfully

undermined the use of a concept of progress at a time when historians and others
began to realise the danger of ethnocentrism in the writing of “universal histories”.
The tendency of nineteenth century Whig history to take Victorian Britain as
normative, and the later tendency of so-called “modernisation theory” (Nisbet,
1969) to do the same for the USA in the twentieth century, increasingly came under
attack from those who “questioned the very concept of modernity itself, in
particular whether all nations really wanted to adopt the West’s liberal democratic
principles, and whether there were not equally valid cultural starting and end
points” (Fukuyama, 1992, p.69). As social science came to have an increasing
influence on historical research, particularly research into cultural development, the
use of a concept of progress (and indeed a concept of decline) was seen as requiring
researchers to make inappropriate value judgements as to what constituted
improvement or worsening. In a homogeneous culture, such judgements would
have reflected a consensus and would not only have gone unchallenged but most
likely would not consciously appear to be judgements at all. As cultures became
more heterogeneous, the description of a particular change as progressive appeared
explicitly to embody a value judgement, which social scientists increasingly wished
to avoid making on methodological grounds. Such value judgements, when not
avoided entirely, became heavily contested.
One area in which a concept of progress appeared to be still viable was
science. An important contribution to our understanding of scientific progress is
provided by the philosopher of science Larry Laudan, in his book Progress and its
Problems (1977). Laudan argues that the adequacy of a scientific theory or research
programme lies in its ability to solve scientific problems. If two theories are
compared, one of which solves more and “weightier” problems than the other, then
the first theory can be regarded as better than the second. Laudan claims that:
Given that the aim of science is problem solving ... , progress can occur if and
only if the succession of scientific theories in any domain shows an increasing
degree of problem solving effectiveness (Laudan, 1977, p.68, italics in original
deleted).

This focus on problem-solving might provide a way of conceptualising progress in

other disciplines and practices, and arguably has already been reflected in historical
studies of accounting by Littleton (1933). Laudan notes that many philosophers and
historians of science have regarded science (in actuality or as an ideal) as a
cumulative system of knowledge. This means that new theories are capable of
solving not only the problems solved satisfactorily by earlier theories but also a set
of additional problems. A notable exception is Kuhn (1962), who suggests that later
theories can be incommensurable with earlier theories. One aspect of this is that
some at least of the problems of earlier theories simply do not exist as problems
within the later theories, not in the sense that those theories can solve them easily,

13
Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

but rather that they are conceptually inexpressible in the terms of the later theories.
Laudan attempts to overcome this objection by claiming that progress is not a
matter simply of the number of problems solved but also their significance or
“weight” (presumably the previously solved problems inexpressible in terms of the
later theories are simply not "weighty" enough to count in an assessment of the later
theories). This move may not be very satisfactory, but the idea that theories (or
indeed practices) can be assessed and compared by their ability to fulfil adequately
some function may be a potentially promising one when we come to consider
progress in accounting. On the other hand, the link between progress and
functionalism in accounting history was precisely what was criticised by Hopwood
(1987, p.206).
The idea of progress has been an important feature of Western historiography
at least since the eighteenth century, although it came to be questioned in the
twentieth century both on empirical grounds, given that civilisation was observed
by some to be declining, and on methodological grounds, on the basis that
judgements of progress involved making unscientific (and thereby unacceptable)
value judgements. However, progress and its associated concept of evolution have
continued to be powerful narrative models for the writing of history. In fact, as the
philosopher of history Gordon Graham points out in his book The Shape of the Past
(1997), progress can be understood has having a range of different “shapes”.
Graham identifies three versions of progress by reference to what an “impartial
observer” in the present would believe about the past, and about whether or not the
observer would hold the same view at any time in the past. This conceptualisation,
by locating judgements at the level of individual preferences, attempts to
circumvent the objection that progress is a value-laden concept. First, there is
“uniform progress”. Here, the observer’s perception is of continuous improvement,
or more formally, an observer in the present believes that, for any time in the past,
there is a later time when he or she would prefer to live, and in addition the observer
would have held this judgement at any past time. Graham contrasts this with
“evolutionary progress”, where the observer in the present would still believe that
for any time in the past there is a later time when he or she would prefer to live, but
this view could not be held at all points in the past. In a model of evolutionary
progress, the observer believes that recent history shows uniform improvement, but
in the past there have been episodes when things got better followed by periods
where they got worse. However, in each succeeding cycle, the best position is an
improvement on the best of the previous cycle, and the worst position is also better
than the worst of the previous cycle. Finally, Graham describes “revolutionary
progress”, where instead of cycles of growth and decay we have long periods of
stasis followed by rapid improvement to a new plateau. Graham expresses a
personal preference for evolutionary progress as “the most plausible form of
progressivism” (Graham, 1997, pp.63-6).

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

Graham’s shapes of progress directly raise the question of the connection

between the concepts of progress and evolution. The problem here is that the term
“evolution” covers a very broad spectrum of meanings. Indeed, Keenan (1998,
p.652) suggests: “‘Evolutionary’ is an adjective with a wide application and
anything, perhaps, which involves processes and outcomes could be so described”.
At its simplest, evolution may signal a process of gradual and continuous change,
in contrast to revolution. This seems to be an important feature of Graham’s
argument. In the accounting literature, evolution is used in this sense by Bromwich
and Bhimani (1989), in their study of changing developments in accounting inside
organisations Management Accounting: Evolution not Revolution. However, most
users of evolution in the context of accounting history are, as Littleton (1933) was,
interested in understanding change in a particular domain as a response to changes
in other domains. Here the analogy with biological evolution begins to be drawn.
This analogy is taken further when the outcome of some process of change is
presented as a result of a variant of “natural selection”. For example, a change in
the economic environment may give rise to new problems that call forth in some
way a range of possible solutions. The solution that ends up predominating might
be considered to do so through a process of the “survival of the fittest”. At one
level, this may be a satisfactory explanation for the observed outcome. I would,
however, suggest that historians will not be satisfied with simplistic evolutionary
explanations along the lines that “the fittest solution has survived” (what the
American Accounting Association (1977) has described as “Accounting
Darwinism” – see also Napier, 1987, p.244) but rather will wish to demonstrate
how the outcome actually is superior to its rivals. The assumption that “what is
observed is fittest” has been challenged recently by Hoskin and Macve (2000,
p.105), who claim:
To say, as [economic rationalists] tend to, that the routines found in the archive
must have represented the optimal trade off of costs and benefits (given the
decision-making and other uses that economic rationalists wish to attribute to
such routines) is empirically empty and essentially tautological. What is still
generally missing is an historical explanation for why particular routines and
their subsequent modifications were the ones that were actually chosen and
why consideration/experimentation was not given to possible alternatives that
may have been even more cost-beneficial.

Analogies with biological evolution also become complex when some goal or end
to the evolutionary process is imputed. One of the ways in which nineteenth
century Christianity tried to accommodate itself to the emerging biological theory
of evolution was to claim that evolution was simply the mechanism by which the
world was moving towards the completion of God’s plan (Ruse, 1999). The secular
variant of this saw evolution as the mechanism by which society progressed
(Bowler, 1989). Evolution was broad enough as a concept to accommodate a range
of positions from extreme laissez-faire (for example, the “social Darwinist” views

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Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

of Herbert Spencer and others) to more interventionist views such as those of the
Fabians and Progressivists. To some, evolution is seen as driving the world towards
some desired end point (it is teleological), to others, evolution is a force for
unbounded progress. This linking of evolution and progress was perhaps
influenced by Darwin’s ideas of “the Descent of Man”: what appears to be a path
of improvement from simple organisms through increasingly complex ones to the
ultimate sentient organism.
However, it is by no means necessary to a theory of evolution that it embodies
any presupposition of increasing or decreasing complexity. Indeed, many modern
biological views of evolution (see, for example, Smith, 1993) tend to combine a
“local” perspective whereby species in particular environmental niches become
dominant because of particular adaptive advantages with a “global” perspective
whereby changes in the environment are expected to lead to changes in the range
and dominance of species in ways that cannot be labelled simply as “progressive”.
There is no reason to expect an environmental change to lead to greater complexity
in the dominant species.
To sum up, progress has been a central theme in the writing of history in the
Western world for over two centuries. A wide range of historians, from the
Universal Historians such as Hegel to the Whig Historians of nineteenth century
Britain, saw history itself as essentially progressive. History was written within a
narrative framework of progress, demonstrating how problems are solved,
challenges overcome and things get better. Metaphors of evolution were often
mobilised, although the equivocal nature of the concept of evolution necessitates
care in our interpretation of how contemporaries used the term. In the twentieth
century, however, a more pessimistic attitude to the world and to humanity on the
one hand, and a reluctance to make value judgements on the other, have made the
idea of progress less fashionable. It is now necessary to see how the concept of
progress and its more recent questioning have had an impact on the writing of
accounting history and on our understandings of accounting more generally.

Progress in accounting history

The relationship between accounting and progress raises some important questions.
The first of these is the empirical question of how far, if at all, accounting itself is
"progressive” at the social level, in the sense that properly functioning accounting
contributes to the improvement of society. Certainly many historians of accounting
have recognised – as does Littleton (1933) – that accounting impacts on society,
and an idealistic view of accounting is that it has the potential of contributing to
social improvement through its embodiment of rational calculation. If we pay
attention, as did Max Weber among others, to “the ways in which particular forms
of calculation help to bring about the rationalisation of the conduct of life in the

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

sphere of the enterprise and more generally” (Miller & Napier, 1993, p.635), and
we see such rationalisation as in itself progressive, then accounting, as a form of
rational calculation, has the potential to be progressive. Of course, if we see the
rationalisation of life as a bad thing, then we will be less likely to regard the spread
of accounting as evidence of social improvement, and less likely to consider
accounting as a possible force for progress. Whatever our position, the criticism of
commentators such as Hopwood (1987) is that traditional historians took
accounting as unproblematically representing a potential for technical
improvement. Broadbent and Guthrie (1992) have described this view in the
context of research into present-day accounting practice as “technical accounting”.
They refer explicitly to Hopwood (1987) when they state that, under this view,
“changes to accounting systems are seen as being progressive and reforms to
accounting practices are based on the notion of teleological trajectory. Changes in
practice are therefore seen as being manifestations of functional progress and
system improvements” (Broadbent & Guthrie, 1992, p.10).
A second question is what might actually constitute progress within
accounting. Understanding progress as meaning change for the better, this is
certainly a central question that must be addressed by the accounting profession
and by both governmental and non-governmental regulators of accounting. It arises
implicitly if not explicitly whenever a new or revised accounting or auditing law or
standard is proposed. What criteria can we use to decide whether the new
regulation is an improvement on the old one, rather than simply being different?
Similarly, both academics and “practical” men and women want to satisfy
themselves that the technical innovations they develop actually represent
improvements on current ideas and practices. To some, progress in accounting was
equated with accounting’s becoming more scientific, not in the sense that theories
used to understand and explain accounting appealed to scientific analogies, as did
positive accounting theory (Watts & Zimmerman, 1986, p.2), but rather in the
sense that accounting measurements would be claimed as conforming to the canons
of objectivity and realism (Chambers, 1966; Sterling, 1979). Perhaps such
innovators would endorse the view put forward by Laudan (1977) that progress can
be assessed in terms of ability to solve more and weightier problems. Mobilising a
problem-solving framework, an accounting historian would need to ask at what
point in time does a particular problem emerge to which accounting might be a
solution.2 The pace of innovation in different times and places could be explained,
within a framework of “comparative international accounting history” (Carnegie &
Napier, 1999), in terms of the emergence at different points of a given problem. For
example, the need to account effectively for business combinations emerges as a
problem at an earlier time in countries with highly developed capital markets such
as the USA and UK, than in countries where not only the way in which business
finance is organised but also the legal structure of complex enterprises is different.

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Accounting History NS Vol 6, No 2 - 2001

In the latter case, the “business combination” may simply not exist as an object to
be accounted for.
In terms of technical progress, claims have been made that accounting has
been subject to periods of stagnation or even decline. It would therefore not exhibit
the pattern that Graham (1997) referred to as “uniform progress”, with steady
improvement from period to period. Raymond de Roover (1955, p.409)
contemptuously dismissed the period between the publication of Pacioli’s Summa,
the first printed treatment of double-entry bookkeeping, in 1494, and the transition
to more sophisticated corporate accounting in the nineteenth century, as an “Age of
Stagnation” (see also Chatfield, 1977, pp.52-61).3 Edwards (1988, p.vi), noting that
“change does not, of course, necessarily mean progress”, gives an example of a
relative decline in the quality of financial reports published by British companies
during the 1920s, as these tended to disclose less than many financial reports
published before World War I.
The suggestion that accounting has declined has been associated particularly
in recent years with Johnson and Kaplan’s Relevance Lost (1987). In fact, although
these authors argue that management accounting systems had become increasingly
inadequate in the later twentieth century, they interpret this “as a relatively recent
decline in relevance, not as a lag in adapting older financial accounting systems to
modern managerial needs” (Johnson & Kaplan, 1987, p.xii). Accounting methods
become obsolescent partly because of changes in the available technologies for
accounting – methods developed in the manual or punch card era can be refined
greatly in the computer era – but also because of changes in the nature of the
problem for which accounting is the proposed solution. Interestingly, this view of
decline in relevance incorporates a narrative of technological progress. Both the
“Age of Stagnation” argument and the Relevance Lost position are capable of
accommodating a long-run view of progress, as stagnation did not last indefinitely,
while the diagnosis offered by Relevance Lost stimulated many enterprises to make
changes in their cost accounting and management systems intended to remedy the
decline in accounting’s relevance (Johnson, 1992).
Furthermore, some historians have pointed to a tendency for accounting
changes to follow recurring patterns or cycles. Mumford (1979) noted that the
various stages in the growth and decline in interest in price-change accounting in
Britain over the 1970s reflected closely similar stages in an earlier cycle in the late
1940s. He put forward his cyclical model “as a blueprint for the next surge of
inflation” (Mumford, 1979, p.98), and also in part as a prediction (subsequently
fulfilled) that, with the decline in the rate of inflation, price-change accounting
would disappear from the agenda of accounting standard-setters, preparers and
users.
A cyclical model has also been proposed by Nobes (1991) for UK standard-
setting.4 Nobes specifically addresses the question as to whether UK accounting

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

standards in the 1970s and 1980s provided evidence of progress, defining this in
terms of the ability of the standard-setter to resolve conflicts, discover unique
answers or impose standard solutions (Nobes, 1991, p.271). It is worth noting how
by implication Nobes identifies progress in accounting with the ability to solve
problems, where solution is defined in terms of obtaining “answers” or at least
“consensus”. Nobes adopts a rather Hegelian position by proposing that:
Progress may be inferred in the sense that the [standard-setting] structure
contained the seeds of its own destruction ... . The inability of the Accounting
Standards Committee to identify or to state or to enforce the “right” answer on
various issues led to the pressure to replace it with a body that might be better
able to manage some or all of these matters (Nobes, 1991, p.271).

This illustrates a central problem with using a concept of progress in historical

explanation: if we focus on a relatively short period of time we might observe a
particular pattern of change (improvement, stasis or decline), but this pattern need
not be the same as that observed over a longer period of time, within which the
shorter period is included. This situation is consistent with the “evolutionary
progress” model of Graham (1997) already discussed, and it may underlie the
relative lack of explicit statements about progress in much of the traditional writing
on accounting history, as against the frequent references to evolution.
However, the “evolutionary progress” model implies one major belief: that,
despite the possibility of setbacks in the past on the road to the present, today’s
observer believes that the current state of affairs is preferable to that at most if not
all points in the past. How far is it reasonable to impute such a belief to traditional
accounting historians using the term “evolution” in their work? A relatively brief
examination is enough to show how several such historians say very little about the
current state of affairs at the time they were writing. Thus Littleton, writing in
1933, brings his book to a close in 1900. Garner, whose classic work Evolution of
Cost Accounting to 1925 includes no fewer than nine chapters on the “evolution”
of particular features of costing, wrote in 1954. Lee and Parker, whose collection
The Evolution of Corporate Financial Reporting was published in 1979, include
some material touching on events close to the date of publication, and their main
motivation was “inviting the reader to explore certain contemporary problems of
accounting through the eyes and pens of historians” (Lee & Parker, 1979, p.viii).
However, far from considering the present to be “better” than most times in the
past, they contend that “few of the major issues of today are unique. In fact, ... they
are often many decades old, and no nearer solution today than they were when first
mooted” (Lee & Parker, 1979, p.viii).
Perhaps the most significant advocate of evolution as a structure for thinking
about accounting history was the American Accounting Association’s Committee
on Accounting History, which reported in 1970. This proposed an objective for
historical study firmly in the tradition of “modernisation theory”:

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By observing the evolution of accounting thought, practices, and institutions

that has corresponded to evolution in the environment (including economic,
social, political, and legal factors), it may be possible to suggest the practices
and institutions which are more compatible with the environments of the
developing world (American Accounting Association, 1970, p.53).

Of nine specific “examples of historical studies which deserve attention”, no fewer

than eight contain the word “evolution”. But despite this predominance of
evolution, it is unclear whether the Committee on Accounting History meant much
more than “process of change”, with some sense that changes in accounting may be
a function of changes in the environment. It is in this sense that more recent
historians seem to appeal to evolution. For example, Jones and Aiken (1995), in
their study of British company legislation of the nineteenth century, argue that
“analysis of political and social evolution is ... essential for explaining the timing
and development of companies legislation of this period” (Jones & Aiken, 1995,
p.61).5
Even if traditional accounting historians have been circumspect about making
claims that accounting has progressed, this is how the new accounting historians
have tended to characterise their general approach. Thus Funnell (1998, p.156)
defends new accounting history by claiming that “accounting history is not the
simple story of progressive improvement in response to the emerging needs of
society”. The view that traditional accounting history was this simple story of
progress is evident from a number of the precursors of the new accounting history.
We can observe this view being expressed right from the start by the central
influence on the emergence of the new accounting history, Anthony Hopwood. He
was a member of a committee set up in 1977 by the British Social Science Research
Council to investigate research needs in accounting. One of the main aims of this
committee was to stimulate research that moved away from what it perceived as
“technical” towards a more socially informed research agenda. The committee was
greatly affected by a perception that change was pervasive in accounting, that
accounting change was not well understood, and that at least a partial
understanding of change could be given by historical studies. However, despite a
recognition of the substantial body of historical research in accounting that, even in
the mid-1970s, had come into existence:
Most members of the committee nevertheless were dissatisfied with not only
the present state of knowledge in the area but also the current directions of
historical research. There has been a tendency for technical histories of
accounting to be written in isolation of their social, economic and institutional
contexts. Accounting seemingly has been abstracted from its social domain
with many of the understandings that are available tending to present a view of
the autonomous and unproblematic development of the technical. Where
efforts have been made to offer alternative perspectives, teleological,
evolutionary or progressive notions of change have often been implicit in the
understandings presented. ... [M]any members of the committee were

20
 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

concerned about the partial, atheoretical and intellectually isolated nature of

much historical work in the accounting area (Hopwood, 1985, pp.365-6).

This view of traditional accounting history not only motivated Hopwood in his own
substantive historical researches (Hopwood, 1987), but was proposed by Miller and
Napier in their paper “Genealogies of Calculation” (1993). The latter paper is open
to the objection that many of the examples of traditional historical accounting
research that it criticised were rather dated, even at the time the first version of the
paper (Miller & Napier, 1990) was written. That Littleton in 1933 may have been
rather simplistic in drawing links between social and economic change on the one
hand and accounting change on the other, and vague on how accounting fed back
to help shape society, does not mean that all traditional historians should have
similar views attributed to them.
The key feature of the new accounting history, as stimulated by Hopwood and
developed by many others working within a wide number of theoretical
perspectives (see, for example, Miller et al., 1991), is that it is a sociological history
written by social scientists. Hence, it is driven by a desire to theorise and generalise,
rather than to particularise. At the same time, the canons of social scientific
research, in particular a nervousness about appearing to make value judgements,
have a significant influence on the form of argumentation. This gives rise to a
potential paradox, as some of the new accounting historians, while documenting the
expansion of accounting and accountants (and related disciplines such as auditing)
into new contexts and domains, have felt distinctly unhappy with what they
perceive as the confining rather than liberating impact of accounting on modern
society. It has been argued forcefully by commentators such as Neimark (1990,
1994) and Armstrong (1994) that the methodological inhibition from making
explicit value judgements has tended to lead to tensions if not contradictions in
much of the new accounting history, particularly that influenced by the French
social theorist Michel Foucault. New historians wish to critique society, and
accounting’s role within society, while their theoretical standpoint tends to locate
value judgements as relative to beliefs and systems of power extant during the
period under study. This undermines the possibility of the very critique that is being
sought, as there is and can be no independent standpoint from which any critique
may be offered that is immune to accusations that it simply reflects a particular set
of values. On the other hand, Foucauldians argue that a Marxist theory of history
appeals to Hegelian ideas of Universal History that have long since been exploded.
Perhaps at this stage it is worth appealing to the archive (Fleischman &
Tyson, 1997). In an unpublished working paper6 that formed the basis of thought
on historical accounting research of the Social Science Research Council
committee discussed by Hopwood (1985), Cyril Tomkins set out his view of the
development of accounting. This contains a remarkable echo of Littleton (1933).
“Developments in accounting came about in the first place in response to economic

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social and political pressures, but, thereafter, acted as an enabling device to assist
further developments” (Tomkins, 1978, p.9, emphasis in original). Moreover,
Tomkins exhibits a degree of optimism that is often lacking from the new
accounting history:
Despite the current criticisms, the long run record of accounting is distinctly
encouraging. There have been occasions when accountants may not have
reacted quickly enough to the needs of the day’s society – for example the very
slow pace (and sometimes backward steps) of increasing disclosure of
information through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, more
currently, the failure to produce acceptable inflation accounting rules and the
lack of new methods to serve the special needs of developing countries where
western (USA and UK) accounting practices are often of little direct relevance.
However, if we take the broad span of history, accounting has on the whole
developed as and when required (Tomkins, 1978, p.9, emphasis in original).

Interestingly, Fukuyama (1992, p.70) suggests that the pessimism of the twentieth
century may have been overdone: “We need to ask whether our pessimism is not
becoming something of a pose, adopted as lightly as was the optimism of the
nineteenth century. For a naïve optimist whose expectations are belied appears
foolish, while a pessimist proven wrong maintains an aura of profundity and
seriousness”. Is there scope for optimism about accounting, and is it legitimate to
tell histories of accounting progress? These issues will be considered in the
concluding section of this paper, which develops the theme of history as narrative
and hence importantly literary rather than simply a neutral piece of science.

Narratives of progress

Within the study of history more generally, one of the most important debates in
recent years has involved the consideration of the extent to which the writing of
history does more than simply provide a “superstructure” (Goldstein, 1976, pp.140-
1) necessary to express in words the objective facts of the past. Indeed, does the
way in which history is written – the “narrative” of history – actually give meaning
to the past (White, 1987, p.2)? If the latter, is there one “correct” narrative already
implicit in past events, or is there the possibility of multiple narratives, and thus
multiple meanings? Within the accounting literature, Funnell (1998) has already
examined this debate at some length,7 and what follows is a very brief sketch of the
issues. On one side, there is the view that:
The historical method consists in investigating the documents in order to
determine what is the true or most plausible story that can be told about the
events of which they are evidence. A true narrative account ... is a necessary
result of a proper application of historical “method”. The form of the discourse,
the narrative, adds nothing to the content of the representation (White, 1987,
p.27).

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

The role of the historian is to tell it “as it actually was”. Historians may want to
explain why events happened as they did by appealing to some broader theory (and
sociologically oriented historians will inevitably wish to take this route), but the
historian’s explanations are separate from the historian’s narratives. Indeed,
historians face a tension: a “scientific” as opposed to a “literary” approach to
history seems to suggest that putting the historical facts into a narrative framework
could lead to the danger of diluting objectivity. The aim of the historian, on this
view, is not to “tell a good story” (Napier, 1989, p.241), but rather to tell the true
story.
However, in recent years strong arguments have been put forward, most
notably by Hayden White, that the content and the form of historical narrative are
inseparable. Moreover, there is no single true narrative: historical events can be
ordered in a narrative – “emplotted” – in different ways. In his seminal work
Metahistory, White proposes a series of standard emplotments8 that can be taken by
historical narratives: romance, comedy, tragedy and satire. In the romance, the hero
of the story triumphs over the world: “it is a drama of the triumph of good over evil,
of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man
over the world” (White, 1973, p.9). In the satire, whose principal style is irony, it
is the world that triumphs: “in the final analysis, human consciousness and will are
always inadequate to the task of overcoming definitively the dark force of death,
which is man’s unremitting enemy” (White, 1973, p.9). Comedy and tragedy, on
the other hand, offer some hope of at least provisional victory over the world, the
difference being the form that this victory takes. In comedy “hope is held out for
the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional
reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural world”, while in
tragedy “there are intimations of states of division among men more terrible than ...
at the beginning. Still, the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he
inhabits ... are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive ... . There
has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators” (White, 1973, p.9).
To White, the choice of emplotment for a historical narrative is a choice of
historical explanation. As the same set of historical evidence is open, at least in
principle, to different emplotments, it can be explained in different ways. In a later
work, White links emplotment specifically to stories of progress:
When Kant turned to the consideration of what could be known from the study
of history, so as to be able to determine what mankind could legitimately hope
on the basis of that knowledge, he identified three kinds of equally pertinent
conclusions. These were that (1) the human race was progressing continually;
(2) the human race was degenerating continually; and (3) the human race
remained at the same general level of development continually. He called these
three notions of historical development “eudaemonianism”, “terrorism” and
“farce”, respectively; they might just as well be called comedy, tragedy, and
irony (if considered from the standpoint of the plot structures they impose upon

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the historical panorama), or idealism, cynicism, and scepticism (if considered

from the standpoint of the world-views they authorise) (White, 1987, p.65).

So a view of general progress is emplotted as comedy, one of decline as tragedy

and one of stasis or recurrence as satire.
Comedy and tragedy are common modes of emplotment in traditional
accounting history. Any narrative that begins with the identification of some
problem (whether this identification is made by the author or is observed in the
historical evidence), sets out the various attempts at addressing the problem, and
ends with describing how the problem was solved, would be a comedy in White’s
terms. A classic example of this form of narrative is given by Neil McKendrick’s
study of Josiah Wedgwood’s cost accounting (McKendrick, 1970). Here,
Wedgwood is faced with the problem of falling profit margins in a time of
economic decline, which he addresses by experimenting with cost estimation
procedures. These turn out to be successful, and Wedgwood persists with them.
This is a clear story of progress. However, when Hopwood tells the story of
Wedgwood, the conclusion is more equivocal: “Wedgwood now had available to
him the basis of a more anonymous and continuous form of surveillance. ... The
newly established accounting system enabled a different set of dynamics to be set
into motion. ... The organisation could be observed and managed in terms different
from those in which it functioned” (Hopwood, 1987, p.218). There is a more ironic
tone to this: Wedgwood’s innovations may have solved one set of problems from
his personal point of view, but they change, not necessarily for the better, how
others in the organisation are affected by the new practices.
Traditional accounting histories may also adopt a mode of tragedy, where an
episode of failure is narrated as a “cautionary tale” from which readers today (and
indeed observers in the past) might learn lessons. Arguably, the mode of
emplotment in Relevance Lost (Johnson & Kaplan, 1987) is one of tragedy (even
though some of the “sub-plots” told along the way may in themselves have the form
of comedy). If American business is seen as the protagonist of the story, then its
persistence with costing methods that were increasingly losing their relevance led,
for some organisations, to bankruptcy, and for others to serious difficulty. There is,
though, a hope that those reading the book will draw lessons from it and change
their costing methods to more relevant ones.9 A satirical or ironic approach to
narrating the same events would rule out such hope.
If different emplotments of the same historical evidence are possible, there is
no single true historical explanation. Choice of emplotment may reflect personal
philosophy: as White points out in the passage quoted earlier, there is an
association between comedy and idealism, tragedy and cynicism, and satire and
scepticism. If a sceptical attitude is regarded as the most appropriate for a social
scientist to adopt, then it is not surprising that the new accounting historians,
reflecting such scepticism, appear to find satire the most comfortable mode of

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 Napier: Accounting history and accounting progress

emplotment, and are uneasy with narratives of progress (or indeed decay).10 This is
well illustrated by the study by Miller (1991) of the British government’s advocacy
of discounted cash flow (DCF) as a means of increasing the rate of economic
growth in the 1960s. Miller is at pains to stress that issues such as the extent to
which DCF was actually adopted, and the extent to which its use helped achieve the
government’s objective of faster economic growth, were not the point of his paper,
which was to study how a particular issue is “problematised” and how DCF was
mobilised in various programmes. As he concludes: “The ‘failure’ of the idealised
programme within which DCF techniques was promoted can be seen as intrinsic to
the very nature of such programmes” (Miller, 1991, p.738). In the final analysis, the
world always triumphs: the characteristic emplotment of satire or irony.
As Berkofer (1995, p.126) notes: “Progress as a way of interpreting and
emplotting history is both a methodology and a moral outlook”. We have already
seen how the influence of social science on history has led to a reluctance to express
a moral outlook, but perhaps the time has come to be less nervous about this. Naïve
optimism may no longer be tenable, but unthinking pessimism may be too bleak an
outlook. The challenge is to accommodate both an informed optimism and an
informed pessimism as acceptable positions, rather than leaving the arena entirely
to the morally evasive ironists of social science. Narratives of accounting that make
use of a progress emplotment, showing how the environment gives rise to new
problems, how individuals and groups experiment with solutions, and how these
solutions either succeed (from the viewpoint of those developing them) or fail
(allowing lessons to be learnt), are just as valid as histories as narratives that claim
not to make judgements of success or failure. Alternative emplotments of the
“same” facts or events are of course possible. It could be argued that Marxist
historical writings in accounting are tragic emplotments offered as counterweights
to comedic or progressive ones: accounting serves capitalism, but only at the
expense of the working class.11 Making capital markets work better may be seen by
some as a successful outcome of reform in financial reporting, but to others may be
simply an exacerbation of exploitation. Once we give up the belief that there is only
one true narrative, we can accommodate a range of different explanations and
understandings of the same set of historical evidence.
Progress narratives may be useful on the small scale, where particular
episodes are under consideration, but are they valid at the level of the “grand
narrative” of an overall history of accounting? It is at this level that I begin to be
more nervous about whether such a “grand narrative”, if it could be written at all,
should reasonably take the form of a story of progress. If we accept that accounting
is at least in part, even if not entirely, a set of practices that are employed with the
aim of carrying out various functions efficiently and effectively, then it is only to
the extent that these functions (and the domains in which they are located) remain
static that we can sensibly compare from one point in time to another how well

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accounting operates relative to these functions. If the functions and domains of

accounting change dramatically from one period to another, then such comparisons
cannot be validly made. This view of the world of accounting could be
characterised as an evolutionary one where, so long as the environment is relatively
static, we may hope to observe progress towards a better fit between accounting
and its environment (particularly as movement towards such a better fit is helped
by human agency rather than relying on chance). However, once the environment
changes significantly, it no longer makes sense to talk of progress, as a degree of
incommensurability enters into the comparison. The borderline between a
relatively static and a significantly changing environment is itself not self-evident,
particularly where specific forms of accounting are being introduced into hitherto
uncolonised domains, and there will doubtless be cases where use of a progress
motif will be problematic rather than clearly acceptable or inappropriate.

Conclusion

My argument leads to the conclusion that it is legitimate for accounting historians

to tell their stories in terms of progress when they are working on a relatively small
scale, so long as they recognise that what is progress for some may be degeneration
for others, and what appears progressive at one point of time may not seem so with
the benefit of hindsight. In terms of such “microhistories” (Williams, 1999), the
historian may wish to emplot the historical narrative in ways that encourage readers
to learn lessons from the past, although perhaps more appropriately we should
consider the lessons those of the particular historian, rather than already there “in
history” (Jenkins, 1999). Hence accounting history will still have a place for
stories, within many different arenas and genres, of “success” or “gallant failure”
(Carnegie & Napier, 1996, p.30), although perhaps with greater self-consciousness
on the part of their authors of the equivocal nature of the histories they narrate.
At the “macro” level, it is certainly worth examining the extent to which those
involved in changing accounting (not only at through national and international
regulation but also within organisations) attempt to mobilise rhetorics of progress
and improvement,12 and the extent to which such rhetorics do not need to be drawn
on as they are taken for granted. But on this larger scale, suspicion about meta-
narratives of progress is still appropriate, particularly where these involve
teleologies. We simply do not know whether the “end of accounting” will be its
glorification or apotheosis as the dominant mode of economic calculation, its
routinisation as a mundane and unpretentious task, or its literal end in oblivion.

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Notes
1. As Carr observes in a footnote, this passage appears in the context of a discussion
of the collapse of the western Roman empire. Carr stresses that Gibbon was not
being ironic in this paean to progress.
2. There is nothing necessary about the extent to which the formulation of a particular
problem – its “problematisation” – and the ways in which solutions to the particular
problem are pursued – “programmes” – admits or includes accounting (Miller,
1991). Why certain issues are seen at particular points in time as problems of
accounting is a legitimate area of historical enquiry.
3. This has been derided as the “after Pacioli, nothing” theory of history by Zan (1994,
p.296).
4. The Nobes (1991) study has been criticised by Skerratt and Whittington (1992),
who argue that the cyclical model is both underdetermined theoretically and non-
descriptive empirically.
5. The approach of Jones and Aiken (1995) has been challenged by several writers,
among them Maltby (1999), who asserts bluntly that “accounting does not
‘evolve’”.
6. A copy of this paper was provided to me by Anthony Hopwood in 1985.
7. Awareness of narrative as a mode of providing explanation and understanding is
spreading beyond the historical aspects of accounting research into broader
organisational and managerial contexts. Recently, Llewellyn has called for the
greater use of narratives in accounting and management research, noting that
“narratives can be explanatory but, more significantly for accounting and
management research, narratives can make some stronger research claims than
calculative research. ... [N]arratives can reveal the individual, human projects
within organisations and ... can construct and identify emerging organisational
strategies” (Llewellyn, 1999, p.233).
8. These are borrowed from the work of the American literary theorist, Northrop Frye
(1957).
9. Much of the historical evidence for Relevance Lost was summarised by Kaplan in a
paper entitled “The Evolution of Management Accounting” (Kaplan, 1984),
showing the persistence of the theme of evolution in different contexts of historical
accounting research. It is possible that this use of “evolution” was particularly
provocative to “new” accounting historians such as Hopwood and Miller. Since
Relevance Lost was published, the authors have diverged in their prescription for
healing the disease of archaic management accounting systems, with Kaplan calling
for different measurement bases, including “The Balanced Scorecard” (Kaplan &
Norton, 1996), while Johnson has suggested that “management by results” is an
inherently flawed approach for the modern industrial organisation (Johnson &
Bröms, 2000).

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10. White (1973, p.375) notes that irony or scepticism “is implicitly present in every
historian’s attempt to wrest the truth about the past from the documents”, and is
manifested in the critical scrutiny applied to historical materials. However, irony
“may be only a tactical tool, functioning as a methodological element in the
preliminary stage of research”, and it need not be carried over into the historian’s
final presentation of the history in a narrative. Here, the historian will present “the
truth” in whatever mode appears to be most appropriate, not necessarily in an ironic
mode.
11. White’s view of Marx as a historian is more complex than this: “For Marx, as for
Hegel, humanity achieves the condition of a Comic reconciliation, with itself and
with nature, by means of Tragic conflicts which, in themselves, appear to offer
nothing more than the consolations of a philosophical comprehension of their
nobility” (White, 1973, p.328, emphasis in original).
12. An issue addressed by Miller and O’Leary (1987), in their discussion of how
projects of national efficiency that aimed to improve the life of the individual, and
through this the nation, involved innovations in human accounting through
processes of standard costing.

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