To pluralise the past in the sense of recognising other voices and other concerns than those which have been served by accounting regulation; To problematise the present; and To facilitate a revision of the accounting agenda for the future. Impact of the special issue A commonly accepted means of assessing the impact of any published work is to examine the citations of that work at a particular point in time. Such quantitative approaches to assessing impacts, however, do not necessarily reflect the quality of published works. We used Google Scholar to obtain citation data, as at , for the six substantive articles appearing in the special issue. Any citation database is open to criticism for omissions and errors, but Google Scholar is increasingly recognised as achieving broad coverage (Meho and Yang, 2007; Harzing, 2008). The results are summarised in Table 1. [INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE] The broad scope of C&N assists in explaining the large number of citations of this article in comparison with the others. The innovative nature of the methodological article by Hammond and Sikka (henceforth “H&S”), as a guide to oral history in accounting, and possibly its provocative title, may go some way to explaining its position as the paper with the next highest number of citations. In effect, C&N and H&S were providing guidance to authors, including students and emerging scholars, on how to carry out historical accounting research. The other works by prominent authors in the field were, on the other hand, addressing ongoing conversations on themes and topics that continue to attract regular contributions as part of the everyday fabric of historical accounting research. In addition to an overall review of all citations to papers in the special issue, further analysis was undertaken of the citations of C&N in English language sources. This revealed the existence of items that were included twice in the Google Scholar list, items that mentioned C&N only in their references (or as “further reading”) but not within the body of
contacts with the work and researches of accounting historians”. As well as identifying accounting documents as “key sources” for business history, Fridenson (2007, p. 377) referred to accounting renovation or renewal as “key elements for a much broader dimension of change” while noting that “attention has been drawn by business historians to how sometimes accounting instruments and accounting methods last too long”, with implications for inhibiting organisational and social change. The relationship between accounting history and business history is a two-way process. Analysing citations appearing in 546 articles published from 1996 to 2008 in the three specialised accounting history journals published in the English language (Accounting History, Accounting Historians Journal and Accounting, Business and Financial History), Bisman (2011, p. 169) reported on the “relatively small overall” number of citations to a range of leading business and economic history journals. Of the three accounting history journals, Accounting, Business and Financial History contributed 51 per cent of these citations, reflecting its more diverse orientation. Bisman’s findings tend to confirm the views of (2005a, p. 233), who has argued that accounting history is a “myopic and introspective discipline” that would benefit from “greater inclusivity”, and has suggested that accounting historians “are similarly distant from the sister discipline of history” (Walker, 2008, p. 312). Bisman (2011, pp. 174-175) concluded that the “well acknowledged desideratum for accounting historians to collaborate with, and draw on the work” of business and economic historians essentially “remains an unanswered challenge”. Bisman (2011) also showed that accounting historians are engaging with other accounting research literature and are particularly drawing on broader perspectives offered by sociological, interpretive and critical frameworks, especially given the extent of citations of articles published in journals such as Accounting, Organizations and Society and Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal and, to a lesser extent, Critical Perspectives on Accounting.