Research directions in accounting history: Reflections and prospects

This article revisits the author’s “Research directions in accounting history” (1989), an early contribution to the historiographical study of accounting. That article identified three key approaches to accounting history: “understanding the past,” “contextualizing accounting,” and “the new positivism,” and anticipated to some degree the intellectual conflict between so-called traditional accounting history and new accounting history, which arose in the 1990s and persists to some extent. This conflict often stressed different views of the role of theory in historical accounting research, different notions of sources and methods, and even different views about the limits and boundaries of accounting itself. Accounting historians still have significant scope for innovation, and many gaps remain to be researched. Some dimensions that historical accounting researchers can consider are periods, places, people, practices, propagation, products, and professions, where newer researchers can collaborate fruitfully with more established accounting historians to expand our knowledge of accounting’s past.