Pluralistic approaches to knowing more: a comment on Hoskin and Macve

INTRODUCTION In the early 1990s, there emerged a growing view, popularized through the pages of important research journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society and Critical Perspectives on Accounting, that traditional historical accounting research was in some senses inferior to the "new accounting history. "1 The term "new accounting history" encompassed a number of methodologies designed to produce what has become known as "critical accounting history. " Among these methodologies, the work of Foucauldians, particularly that of Professors Hoskin and Macve, focuses on areas of particular interest to ourselves. We address their literature in some of our work2 for the following interrelated reasons. First, we found it difficult to understand the precise direction of their arguments concerning the position of human accountability in the development of modern managerialism and the relationship between human accountability and modern management accounting. As Funnell [ 1996] argued, language can create barriers, and we, like others, found this a factor in our inability to interpret in a meaningful manner the messages that Hoskin and Macve wished to convey. Second, we were keen to encourage an interchange of ideas between historians of different persuasions. Third, we perceived unwarranted criticisms from critical accounting historians of traditional accounting history.3 Fourth, certain groups of earlier researchers were categorized, in an apparently derogatory fashion, through the use of labels such as "traditional," "economic determinist," and "economic rationalist. " BOYNS AND EDWARDS' RESEARCH Our research has been predicated on the conviction that good management accounting history should be founded on archival evidence, widely defined. We have therefore concentrated our attention on knowing more about the use of accounting and accounting techniques in British business from the industrial revolution period, through the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century, via archival-based research. If this should, at a later stage, make it possible either for ourselves or others to carry out grand theorizing, then this will reinforce our feeling that the research which we have undertaken has proved useful and contributed to "knowing more. " In particular, our work on 19th century British management accounting, through the analysis of archival records informed by our interpretation of contemporary texts and studies of accounting's past, has been directed at the following: to discover the accounting practices followed by business entities and to understand the context in which particular procedures were developed and others discarded; to demonstrate that there is a form of accounting outside "human accounting" that might make a serious claim to serve as an effective basis for managing a business enterprise; to test the impression conveyed, "perhaps unwittingly" [Boyns and Edwards, 1996, p. 40], that 19th century British developments in accounting were the same as in the U.S.; to press the point that accounting practices employed in Britain fit reasonably comfortably within a definition of management accounting. Here, the concern was to counter the impression conveyed by earlier Foucauldian-based analyses that the failure of businessmen to embrace human accounting meant that they were not "doing" management accounting. In pursuing this research agenda, we have not adopted a purely "economic rationalist" stance and have only devoted limited space to a direct consideration of the contribution of the Foucauldian school. As pointed out in Boyns et al. [1997], although we would locate ourselves within Loft's "neoclassical revisionist" school, we nevertheless accept that economic factors might not be the only ones influencing the adoption of particular practices or modes of accounting at specific points in time or space. We are aware of the fact that businessmen are not atomistic profit maximizers even if "control of costs became an essential fact of economic life for those businesses operating in a competitive environment" [Boyns and Edwards, 1995, p. …