This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Global in scope, accounting has had its share of great thinkers and practitioners, from Luca Pacioloi, the father of accounting, to R. J. Chambers, W. W. Cooper, Yuji Ijiri, Stephen A. Zeff and other figures. This encyclopedia presents more than 400 entries that focus on such subjects as publications in the field, institutional bodies, accounting and economic concepts, accounting issues, authors in accounting, records, leaders in the profession, accounting in various countries, financial court cases, accounting exams and historical researchers.

The clerk attended his desk and counter at the intersection of two great themes of modern historical experience: the development of a market economy and of a society governed from below. Who better illustrates the daily practice and production of this modernity than someone of no particular account assigned with overseeing all the new buying and selling? In Accounting for Capitalism, Michael Zakim has written their story, a social history of capital that seeks to explain how the “bottom line” became a synonym for truth in an age shorn of absolutes, grafted onto our very sense of reason and trust. This is a big story, told through an ostensibly marginal event: the birth of a class of “merchant clerks” in the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century. The personal trajectory of these young men from farm to metropolis, homestead to boarding house, and, most significantly, from growing things to selling them exemplified the enormous social effort required to domesticate the profit motive and turn it into the practical foundation of civic life. As Zakim reveals in his highly original study, there was nothing natural or preordained about the stunning ascendance of this capitalism and its radical transformation of the relationship between “Man and Mammon.”

Topical critique of the failure of accounting to prevent corporate financial standards Accessibly written and clearly presented arguments with a foreword by an eminent figure in accounting standards Proposes an alternative system for the improvement of corporate governance

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History provides compelling evidence of how accounting, when conceived of as a technology rather than simply as a tool to increase efficiency, can work as a means to sustain power relations in different sites, such as the Church, the State or the factory. This book, drawing upon the growing body of work which focuses on Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, demonstrates how accounting practices were effective in the subjugation of single individuals or entire populations, whether Roman Catholic priests, State functionaries, inhabitants of conquered lands or workers. The effectiveness of accounting as a tool of power is linked to its neutral and technical appearance, which makes it difficult for those oppressed and controlled by its practices to oppose it. Its adaptability to different organizational contexts, as documented in The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History, makes it a valuable tool for sustaining existing power relations and reproducing inequalities and exploitation. The Italian and Iberian Influence in Accounting History is vital reading for academics and researchers in the fields of accounting, accounting history, political management and sociology and European history.