Accounts of change: 30 years of historical accounting research

Over the past three decades, a desire to understand the processes of change within accounting, and the contribution made by accounting to broader societal and organizational change, has stimulated a substantial body of historical research in accounting. Labelled as the “new accounting history”, this diverse collection of methodological approaches addressing a wide range of problems has made possible the posing of new questions about accounting’s past. The understanding of what counts as accounting has broadened, a greater awareness of how accounting is intertwined in the social has emerged, voices from below have been allowed to speak, while accounting has been seen to be implicated in wider arenas, with networks of practices, principles and people constituting varieties of “accounting constellations”. The paper reviews the central contribution of Accounting, Organizations and Society to the emergence of the new accounting history, and suggests some directions in which this may develop in the future.