Accounts and assemblage: twists, turns, and the tales we tell

Introduction

In the foreword to A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman (1978) provides a synthesis of what she considers ‘the hazards’ of the historian's enterprise: uncertain and contradictory data, conflicting and limited evidence, ‘disproportionate survival’ of the negative, and ‘difficulty of empathy’. Historians face any number of these dilemmas in the effort to craft a convincing account, while respecting disciplinary norms and the imposed limitations of evidentiary sources. Whether one considers the foreword of a volume essential reading to frame the context and to set the stage, or simply obligatory pages before the main action, it sheds light on the task faced by the author. Our role as reader is to evaluate if the account stands up to critical scrutiny. Tuchman discusses concerns with which historians are familiar – the need to piece together a coherent whole from fragmentary materials, judgements made, and the roads and avenues not pursued. She reminds us that history examines ‘the past’ based on sources that have survived – which appears obvious yet introduces the oft-faced limitation of survivorship bias.¹

Tuchman's tome is narrative history of the highest order, a story framed around the dynasty of the de Coucy family. The reader holds her work to a different standard of evidence compared to enjoying, for example, a historical novel by C.J. Samson or Philip Kerr, where we seek authenticity but not footnotes.²

The objective of the two streams – historical narrative and historical fiction – share similarities, especially in the need to hold the reader's rapt attention and convince her that the account holds together. Many of us have read a novel (or a research manuscript) where after a period of escalated commitment (we have already read a few hundred pages, usually with respect to novels not manuscripts), the closing instalment leaves us less than satisfied that the tale is logically consistent. Fiction must ring true to be convincing, as must historical research (Phillips 1995; McWatters and Lemarchand 2010). If it does not, we dismiss it (and subsequent work by the same author) despite glowing endorsements on the book jacket.

Let's leave fiction aside and return to history, in our case, the history of accounting. Over the past 30 years, contributors to Accounting History Review (previously Accounting, Business & Financial History) have responded to questions of evidence, the call for more sources, and the need to select and organise data to produce a coherent account. Authors, referees, and editors have made judgement calls. We have sprinkled our research with probably, perhaps, and possibly (as Tuchman also admits) to arrive at the plausible. The result has been rich and open debate, a plethora of topics and approaches, and an emphasis on rigour and excellence. It provides a story of our discipline's trajectory over time and space.

Yet instead of looking back on these three decades with statistics, classificatory lists and tables, we close our thirtieth volume by examining briefly issues that have engendered their share of discussion and debate across our networks and within history more generally. For a retrospective view, Trevor Boyns provides in his reflections in this issue a brief outline of the journal's creation as Accounting, Business & Financial History (Figure 1) and its link to the ‘Cardiff Conference’.

Figure 1. Accounting, Business & Financial History, Volume 1, Number 1 (October 1990).

Notwithstanding, in recognition of our milestone year, I strongly encourage you to renew your acquaintance with the wealth of research in our previous volumes. You may find that a question that you consider novel has been examined many times before, not necessarily in the same way, or with the same methodology. You might even wish to pick up one of your own articles and reflect upon what has changed since its publication. Would you ask the same questions? In the same way? Would you realise, as I did when re-reading one of my first publications (McWatters 1995) drawn from my doctoral dissertation, that the discipline has come a long way. As Dorothy states in The Wizard of Oz, ‘Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.’

In the next pages, I read no crystal ball or tea leaves to attempt to mould our disciplinary directions. Rather, this editorial offers brief comments on various angles and avenues in our research, paths well-trodden, and others perhaps worthy of renewed or novel attention. Readers might consider the ensuing paragraphs an indulgence, musings of a raving editor. Be that as it may, I hope that they will be taken in the spirit in which they are offered, as a vehicle to motivate our on-going conversations of what we do as historians.³

Stories, tales, and accounts

As I have noted elsewhere, historians must be good storytellers (McWatters 2014) and accounting, by its very nature, offers the raw materials for such storytelling (McWatters and Lemarchand 2010, 2013).⁴ Thomas King underscores the storytelling nature of history in the first chapter of The Inconvenient Indian, his ‘curious account of Native people in North America’:

Most of us think that history is in the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

Which of course, it isn't.

History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They are not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment. (King 2012, 2–3)

When reading King's account, we quickly realise and appreciate that (even for King) being a good narrator does not translate into being free to tell a/the story in any way that one might prefer.⁵ The very word, ‘history’ – ‘his story’ – points to the reality that historians inherently and necessarily choose, include, and exclude. Those deliberate choices have consequences in terms of whose story is told, and who is accounted for.

The philosophy of history has witnessed rich deliberations and investigations of the place of narrative historiography and narrative accounts in historiography. One would be premature and foolish to declare such debates final, but they have moved forward, summed up efficiently by Philippe Carrard (2015) as ‘narrative matters’. Of course, this comment comes at the end of his own exposition of a spectrum of alternatives from the realist narrative à la David Carr to the constructive arguments of Hayden White and Louis Mink:

Carr has defended the idea that since human actions unfold in time, they have a narrative structure that precedes the story the historian may tell and is independent from it: “Storytelling obeys rules that are imbedded in action itself, and narrative is at the root of human reality long before it gets explicitly told about” (2008, p. 29). For Carr, the historian's ambition to “represent” is thus perfectly legitimate; far from differing by its form from the actual world, narrative can be regarded as homologous to the reality that it describes. The historian's goal, according to Carr (2001), is eventually to “get the story straight”: to identify the story, and to tell it as it actually unfolded. One must point to the use of definite article “the”: it implies that there's one story, one valid version of the past, which the historian has the task to identify on the basis of the available evidence.

The constructivist position is of course represented by Hayden White, but it had already been defended by Louis Mink … According to Mink (1987), “stories are told, not lived” (p. 60). To put it otherwise, our experience of the world cannot be equated with a narrative: our lives do not take on a narrative form before we make them into the subject of a story. Similarly, the idea that the past is an “untold story,” a story that has not yet been recounted, is for Mink an “indemonstrable assumption” (p. 188). The job of the historian is to construct a story using the available data, not to uncover the story that lies hidden in those data. (Carrard 2015, 187–188)⁶

Verónica Tozzi (2018) suggests that we extend the narrativist philosophy of history by incorporating the tenets of pragmatist philosophy. She argues that this dialogue ‘would build necessary bridges between the various forms of appropriation of the past undertaken by academic historiography, literature and life, while reinforcing the narrativist programme as the best fit for discussing the social, ethical and political role of academic history’ (Tozzi 2018, 67). Her pragmatist option also reminds us that we do more than ‘write history’, we teach it. Yet our stories rely on facts and evidence, how we organise them, and how we present them to recount our tale. Again, King enlightens us:

Mind you, there is a great deal in The Inconvenient Indian that is history. I’m just not the historian you had in mind … And in consideration of those conversations and the respect that I have for history, I’ve salted my narrative with those things we call facts, even though we should know by now that facts will not save us. (King 2012, xi)

Peter Kosso (2011) examines narrative historiography, in particular the distinction between facts versus evidence, and the structure of description and justification. As he notes,

give and take between theory and evidence can be accommodated in a narrative form, but it is now advisable to be explicit about the theory⁷ … There is still a story to tell, but the pieces are neither self-selecting nor self-organizing. The narrator has an active part in preparing and presenting the narrative, and the reader deserves to know what guides the process. (Kosso 2011, 21)

Aviezer Tucker (2004) in his examination of scientific historiography further underscores the role of evidence and historiographic propositions:

Historiographic propositions about the past come in all shapes and sizes, factual and explanatory, more abstract and general or more local and concrete, narrative-like, part of a story, or in plotless summaries of statistical data and relationships. Historiography can be written in prose or as a poem. As Aristotle (1996, p. 52b) argued in the Poetics, the style of historiography does not matter since it would be possible to turn the works of Herodotus into verse and their epistemic status would not change. Historiography is about what happened, whereas poetry is about what would have happened, requiring imagination. Leon Goldstein (1976, pp. 36–38) concluded that good historiography is distinguished from bad according to its relation with the evidence. The significant criteria are epistemic; the forms of the statements, their complexity or generality are epistemically insignificant. The form or style of historiography do not affect its relation with the evidence, its epistemic status. Narratives are not necessarily fictional. There are scientific stories about the evolution of life, the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, Luci the mother of mankind, etc. There are even logical and mathematical narratives, in which Lewis Carroll excelled. Narratives, like scientific theories or legal verdicts, can be determined, indetermined, and underdetermined. Determination is achieved on epistemic rather than stylistic grounds (Laudan 1992, p. 64). (Tucker 2004, 92)

As we have seen in all areas of history, including within the pages of this journal, our discipline has demonstrated no shortage of twists and turns in its approach to narrative, discourse, evidence, and data gathering. While some of us place ‘theory’ in the foreground, others choose to relegate it to the background, even to the point of negating its use. Tucker argues that such denial results from historians’ unawareness of the theoretical underpinnings of their disciplinary practice. He provides the following analogy:

Imagine a person who learns how to start a car by imitating another who performs a little ritual, such as humming the first bars of Mahler's Sixth Symphony while turning the ignition key. This method works of course, though humming Mahler is superfluous for its results. A person who has some rudimentary theoretical knowledge of car mechanics would be able to distinguish the functional from the ritualistic elements of the method, but a mere imitator of method would not. Historians whose methodical practices contain such ritualistic elements have no understanding of the theoretical foundations of their methods; they turned a science into a ritualistic tradition. (Tucker 2004, 84)

While we need not adopt Tucker's position, we can share the analogy. Through our work as researchers, teachers, authors, referees, and editors, we have become familiar with the multitude of theories that have enriched our research and writing. We have seen them come and go, quickly become the latest trend and craze, only to drop off the scene with the arrival of an upstart. Many of us confronted these changes and mutations as graduate students. I recall my own doctoral training where we joked about the theoretical flavour of the month. These theories, whether overt or covert, shift from one generation of historians to another in non-linear fashion, frequently returning to where we once began. We examine these ‘twists and turns’, discarded notions, and debated concepts in the next section.

Twists and turns

While the calls for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research have been met with muted enthusiasm and actions, accounting historians are no different than their counterparts in other branches of history where theories from other disciplines have been adopted, adapted, promoted, and discarded. While some colleagues can be said to ‘walk the talk’, and demonstrate theoretical coherence and continuity, others could be accused of theoretical opportunism. Regardless, this shift to various turns – literary, linguistic, cultural, affective, spatial, iconic, global, and so forth – has also brought its fair share of narrowness. Researchers who choose the wrong one at the wrong time in the eyes of referees can find themselves on dangerous ground. Even while we espouse openness, we can be quick to reject a study that does not march to our preferred tune. These turns have parallels in other branches of history. Peter Lambert and Phillipp Schofield (2004) note, ‘Historians have been notorious under-achievers in the construction of grand theories, but adept and eclectic in adopting, testing and adapting theories produced by others’ (Lambert and Scofield 2004, 4).⁸

As editor, I attempt to mitigate this rejection scenario by choosing referees who are expert in the theory, era/time period, geography, and methodology, including a reliance on referees who are not in accounting, but who have specific disciplinary expertise. It is not acceptable as a scholarly community to encourage submissions from those in sister disciplines then reject them dismissively when the approach does not mesh with our preferred theory – a situation that arises most often when the author in question stems from what some of us might call ‘mainstream’ history.

In contrast to these turns, we might ponder some twists, one being that advanced by Herbert Klein (2017): history's turning away from social science at a time when one could argue that social science is turning to history. It is relatively straightforward to test this proposition through a library database search engine. Klein's analysis is definitely US-centric, a caveat that he acknowledges, and it focuses on what he perceives to be the ‘turning’ in history departments to the humanities.⁹ This argument could be reformulated, given the frequent distinction between history and sociology with respect to the role of theory and evidence.

Klein retraces a route familiar to accounting historians. For more than three decades and the/a cultural turn, historical research has demonstrated a ‘rejection of quantitative analysis’ and frequently a ‘hostility towards economics’ (Klein 2017, 295). A vivid expression of these turnings can be found in the rapid rise of the new history of capitalism. This body of research dominates the agenda at conferences and workshops, while increasingly criticised for its leaving behind all that we apparently know or knew about these issues. This history of capitalism rarely defines capitalism. Rather than an analysis of economic behaviour, it shifts more to social critique (Hilt 2017, 512). Moreover, Eric Hilt notes, ‘Too frequently, the historians of capitalism present arguments without examining the validity of their assumptions or exploring alternative explanations of their implications’ (Hilt 2017, 515).

This research reminds us of the limits of economic theory yet often at the expense of rigour. This point is noted frequently in The Journal of Economic History and the Economic History Review in the proliferation of research studies and book reviews that examine and attempt to account for the new history of capitalism (Hilt 2017; Hannah 2020; Wright 2020). In contrast, other historians point to the rise of big data and the possibilities that these data sets offer. In a special issue of Social Science History, Kris Inwood and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart (2020) tackle the question of facts and evidence from a different perspective. In their view,

[h]istorians and social scientists routinely, and inevitably, rely on sources that are unrepresentative of the past. … The articles in this special issue of the journal illustrate the widespread prevalence of selection bias in historical sources, and the ways in which historians negotiate this challenge to reach useful conclusions. (Inwood and Maxwell-Stewart 2020, 411)

Peter Baskerville and Kris Inwood (2020) further note the return to quantitative data, what they label ‘big historical data’ in parallel to developments in US research, after a period of continuous decline ‘under the influence of the “cultural turn,” and a growing appreciation for postmodern epistemologies’¹⁰ (in press; see also Guttmann, Merchant, and Roberts 2018).

Ran Abramitzky shifts the conversation to explore the place of the economic historian within economics, and how economists and economic historians relate and respond to each other. Replace ‘economics’ with ‘accounting’ and we have a familiar story. In short, economists/accountants do not appreciate history as much as economic/accounting historians do:

We believe that understanding the past, which contributes to our knowledge of history and shapes our minds, is an important intellectual activity for its own sake even if, like pure math, physics, philosophy, and the arts, it does not have immediate practical use or policy implications for today.

The typical modern economist does not share this view that history is interesting for its own sake. Most economists care about the past only to the extent that it sheds light on the present. This is unfortunate and we can (and should) keep arguing that this is a narrow view of social science and that economics misses out on many important contributions in this way, … 

The fact that the typical modern economist does not care about the past per se does not mean that there is no room for economic history in modern economics. Most economic historians believe that to understand the present and future we need to understand the past and how we got here to begin with. (Abramitzky 2015, 1242)

Advice for historians when communicating with economists, warning of the need to adopt a lingua franca, could prove apropos for accounting historians who attempt to navigate similar conversations with our accounting colleagues:

Even a friendly economist who listens to the economic historian often is thinking: “What is the hypothesis that you want to test?,” “How did you address the endogeneity problem?,” “What is your identification strategy?,” and “How is your historical research relevant for today?” (Abramitzky 2015, 1244)

Those of us who work across disciplinary boundaries are familiar with these challenges and the mechanisms to overcome them to forge cross- and transdisciplinary bridges and understandings. Recent literature in adjacent disciplines reminds us too that boundaries relate to time and space, and to generations and geography. The analyses of Klein and Abramitzky align better with the US situation and seem at odds with disciplinary shifts in other parts of the globe.¹¹ Alternatively, their analyses suggest avenues open to accounting. If Klein and Abramitzky seek more quantitative data in history, accounting historians are well versed in these approaches and might seek out collaborative possibilities to contribute fruitfully to apparent ‘growth areas’.¹²

Generational twists and turns demand attention in that our linguistic/cultural/iconic/spatial turns represent and reflect our own training and the influence of those who we followed. We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are. Thus, most of us (arguably) acknowledge at some point in time how our views, interpretations, and adoption of a framework, theory, and approach reflect from whence we came. Yet, our trajectory is fashioned retrospectively and often in a linear progression, while the turns that we encounter in our research are fragmentary and recursive. Mergel (2017) reviews these turns, their intermingling, and the changes in our historical understandings that they brought about.¹³ New scholars interpret, recast, and reject them. A series of opinion pieces in the American Historical Review offers a retrospective on the impacts of these ‘turns’ and the refusal of forum participants

to see “turning” as a simple or unproblematic feature in the recent past of our profession. Rather, they both analyze the turns and historicize them—subjecting them to a searching and wide-ranging critique that at once reminds us of what can be gained by such historiographical retrospection and also what might be lost in thinking of them in both definitive and categorical terms. (Introduction, “Historiographic ‘Turns’ in Critical Perspective”, American Historical Review 2012, 698)

Indeed, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (2012) argues that ‘turns are often described in an almost religious language of conversion experiences and about-faces. This language reifies what came before and suggests that it has been decisively supplanted by another way of writing and thinking’(Perl-Rosenthal 2012, 804). This view of ‘turn talk’ is reinforced by that of Gary Wilder (2012) who contends that the ‘domestication’ of linguistic and cultural turns has led to a return to a more traditional and routinised historiography over time and space (Wilder 2012, 723). Similarly, Surkis (2012) points out that turns were ‘multiple and mutually questioning’ (Surkis 2012, 705) without ‘an orderly an orderly logic of progression and supersession, or uniformly across the discipline’ (Surkis 2012, 718). Her genealogical study suggests that the “‘linguistic turn” was not a coherent moment. It cannot be conceived as the intellectual property of a single historiographical generation or consigned to a collective past’ (Surkis 2012, 719). James W. Cook (2012) speaks of the ‘historical imperialism’ of the cultural turn along with its ‘long-running plasticity’ (c.f. Cook 2012, 762–770). If nothing else, these arguments (supported by a wealth of footnotes for further reading) provide a cautionary tale of our need to be broad readers of our own historiography. This engagement also contributes to ‘theoretical mindfulness’ (Thomas 2012, 803).

Whither accounting history?

In the face of such theoretical possibilities, novel data sources, and new methodological approaches, it would seem that the world is our oyster. How then to encourage a new generation (if we can speak of such) to join us on this voyage of discovery? It would be presumptuous to offer a road map – we cannot know what we will discover on the voyage, what we will do with what we find, or what our discoveries will do to us – but perhaps one vehicle is through our use of digital tools and platforms to encourage scholarly collaboration. It would seem from this brief review of trends and trajectories in the discipline that we are not short of possibilities to explore new issues in novel ways. In the next section, I explore one approach that came to me via the curiosity created in the classroom.

Assemblage

Students are frequently our best teachers. Their questions challenge us to re-think our historical positions, long-held assumptions, and unquestioned stance on issues and events. Given that the exposure to history is limited in most business schools, students arrive in a history class filled with the theoretical models and approaches that they have experienced in other courses. The interpretation of evidence, the use of inference, and ‘critical common sense’ encourage students to avoid the over-sophistication of theoretical models. Students soon realise to their relief that a history course is not fact checking, memorisation of names and dates, but an effort to have them engage with the source materials to explain and interpret the past on their own terms.

Undergraduates often express that they have never had a class like this before. Some of them state it rather differently as ‘we’ve never had a class where we had to think so much!’ While I am certain that they do lots of ‘thinking’ in other courses, the history classroom offers a different type of thinking, reflection, debate, and sharing of perspectives. Studying history is also humbling; life did not begin with the smart phone and computers. Medieval traders and merchants of the Early Modern era were more globally aware than students realise. Instead of an international student exchange, family members were sent to other countries to work in the merchant houses of their network partners to learn the language, culture, and business practices.

Teaching history is humbling for the professor too. Students tend to think that you are an expert on every topic and time period. They ask multi-faceted questions and anticipate rapid, ready-made responses. Over several weeks, we begin to realise that we are dipping briefly into a rich historiography. We settle on a few things: History is all about people, their networks, and their behaviour. We confront history from the present with our misconceptions and biases. History can be interesting in itself, yet has useful spin-off effects in terms of analytical skills and the ability to marshal evidence to defend a compelling argument.

Further, our teaching of history informs our research (distinguished from the oft-stated reverse comment in university brochures that we bring our research into our teaching). It might be directly or indirectly, with nuance or with blunt force. I will stick with nuance, in this case, the insights of mind mapping and word clouds for research. While we often use these techniques to explore a research idea, my students have used them creatively and innovatively to bring history to life and to demonstrate how one might assemble a number of concepts, issues, and evidence in a knowledgeable way. Virtual ‘treasure hunts’ and trips to archives, museums, and libraries are translated into visual representations of what they have learned. This approach has been particularly enlightening when students fuse art collections and exhibits with business concepts to explore the legacies of mercantilism and colonialism.

Mind maps and word clouds are not new and have their own history. Today, digital tools and software make them easier to do quickly, but if done thoughtfully and carefully, they have a lot of appeal as a teaching tool. The concept of assemblage is also not new. With all due respect to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarí, my adoption of this term stems from its etymology – roughly the Middle English from the Old French from the Vulgar Latin – and not the mistranslation of the French agencement into English as assemblage, along with a novel twist in pronunciation – not assemblage but assemblage.¹⁴ Yet before assemblage theory, we did have assemblage – the collection or gathering of people, objects, (unrelated) things, the blending of wine, and so forth. Perhaps butterflies come to mind in nature and artwork collage. Sophie Thomas’s (2018) study of the ‘strange and mixed assemblage’ of the house-museum of Sir John Sloane offers some intriguing possibilities for accounting with respect to the social life of the archive and its ‘self-reflective construction’ (Thomas 2018, 121).

It would be interesting to link these approaches. For example, Anne Thick (1999) examines medieval Southampton through an analysis of the town steward's account books, while Ben Jervis (2018) revisits Southampton through the lens of archaeological evidence. What if we attempted our own collage or assemblage? Jervis concludes his study with the proposal to examine ‘how towns transformed, as processes of becoming urban changed’ from ‘seeing later medieval towns as in decline’ (Jervis 2018, 154). It seems plausible that accounts and accounting, as examined by Thick, might further this understanding. A second example of the potential for cross-fertilisation is the study, ‘Becoming Bourgeois: Benjamin Franklin's Account of the Self’, by Andrew Lawson (2020). His engagement with the accounting history literature to inform his analysis of Franklin's failed pursuit of ‘moral perfection’ is intriguing.¹⁵ Lawson argues

that Franklin's identification of the thirteen cardinal virtues and his methods for observing them were closely modelled on the methods of double-entry bookkeeping and that his moral system is the product of a financial crisis that threatened to destabilize his early career. In Franklin's moral-economic narrative, assuming responsibility for one's debts and the accurate settling of accounts are the distinguishing marks of rational self-making, the foundation of a fully bourgeois conception of human flourishing. (Lawson 2020, 465)

Figure 2 represents one such assemblage drawn from the concepts examined in this editorial.

Figure 2. Accounts and assemblage: twists, turns, and the tales we tell.

A final comment

While it might be the time to look back on our three decades in terms of what we have accomplished, theoretical battles won and others lost, attempts at inclusion, and instances of exclusion, it is perhaps more fruitful to look to the future. Whether we confront new turns, mobilise our research through theories and concepts borrowed from elsewhere, or develop them organically, we shall continue to promote disciplinary diversity. We have seen our research cross time and space, including our success in welcoming research from scholars whose voices are not familiar to us. As we examine accounting in history, we shall seek answers to new questions and ask longstanding questions in novel ways. Let's embrace the scholarly opportunities and celebrate our openness to serendipity, playfulness, and community.

Acknowledgements

The editor extends special thanks to her predecessors in ‘this chair’, John Richard (Dick) Edwards, Trevor Boyns, and Stephen P. (Steve) Walker, for their support as I chart the course of Accounting History Review. I also wish to thank my true friend and co-author, Yannick Lemarchand, with whom I have shared much of my research journey. Finally, a thank-you to my students who have taken up the challenge of a history course as part of their undergraduate programme (although they would counter that it is ‘almost required’) and who have brought history to life in our management school.

Notes

1 From my own experience, referees do question the value of studying a firm that fails compared to those which triumph against the odds.

2 As an avid reader of both these authors, I can attest to their ability to blend research and writing to tell a compelling story. Phillips (1995) makes the case for the place of narrative fiction in organisational analysis.

3 Edwards and Walker (2020) is an invaluable resource to examine the history of accounting in detail and depth.

4 I wish to thank David McCallum-Oldroyd for his sharing of a video that he prepared for his students to convey the place of accounting in many historical events.

5 While this comment refers in this instance to The Inconvenient Indian, it applies equally to King's many novels and other writings.

6 In Narrative Theory, Kent Puckett (2016) provides a good synthesis of these arguments. See also White (2001).

7 Kosso (2011) delineates the difference between theory and evidence as one of scope; evidence is specific in context, whereas theories are more general and not associated with any particular text.

8 See also Tucker (2004), in particular chapters five and six.

9 A point of distinction initially lost on this reader trained in a department of history considered to be part of the humanities, in contrast to politics and sociology that were in the social sciences.

10 Milligan (2020) takes a different approach to the digital historian with a thoughtful discussion of the impact of digital photography on historical research and the historian's craft. We might beg to differ with his overall assessment of its being positive, while agreeing with his call for increased awareness of the implications of this shift.

11 Abramitzky (2015) acknowledges the limitation of his analysis in its focus on the interface of economics and economic history. It might not stretch to fit other disciplines. However, he offers a small set of authors whose work enables one to explore this challenge.

12 Abramitzky (2015) also includes advice on how to get into top journals by engaging in the ‘big think’ questions, exploring ‘big data’, and adopting machine-learning techniques to ‘digitise humanity’.

13 Mergel (2017) examines primarily the German-speaking historiography and political history. Yet the arguments lend themselves to accounting history. For an additional perspective, see the analysis of Cultural Studies by Stephen B. Crofts Wiley and J. Macgregor Wise (2019).

14 This mistranslation has been traced to the initial translation of the French noun agencement in Rhizome (Deleuze and Guattarí 1981) and A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattarí 1987). Assemblage has been retained by others who have relied on translations (although initially rarely used by Deleuze and Guattarí) and who treat the concept as self-evident. Ian Hall (2015) provides a thoughtful summary of these arguments. For an examination of the potential of assemblage theory in accounting, see Lennon (2021).

15 This article contains a number of references to the history of accounting to which I was alerted thanks to a digital notification of the citing of McWatters and Lemarchand (2013).