Govern(mentality) and Accounting: the Influence of Different Enlightenment Discourses in Two Spanish Cases (1761-1777)

New perspectives in accounting history have uncovered previously unattended relations between accounting and government. Earlier Foucauldian analyses of governments have not explained sufficiently the relations of accounting practices to governmental discourses in order to manage populations. This w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Abacus (Sydney) 2005-06, Vol.41 (2), p.181-210
Main Authors: Sánchez-Matamoros, Juan Baños, Hidalgo, Fernando Gutiérrez, Espejo, Concha Álvarez-Dardet, Fenech, Francisco Carrasco
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accounting
Agriculture
Agronomy
Cameralism
Economic discourses
Economic history
Economics
Enlightenment
Europe: History
Foucauldian analyses
Government
Governmentality
History
Institutions
Manufacturing
New Settlements of Sierra Morena and Andalucia
Organisations
Philosophy
Power relations
Public administration
Public enterprise
Public sector
Quality standards
Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville
Spain
Studies
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Summary:New perspectives in accounting history have uncovered previously unattended relations between accounting and government. Earlier Foucauldian analyses of governments have not explained sufficiently the relations of accounting practices to governmental discourses in order to manage populations. This work uses the governmentality frame to analyse the role of accounting in two organizations located in the south of Spain in the second half of the eighteenth century: the New Settlements of Sierra Morena and Andalucia (NSs) and the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville (RTFS). The period studied is remarkable because it was the apogee of the Enlightenment in Spain. From the standpoint of government, this period facilitated a new way to manage populations. The present work has drawn on Foucault's concept of governmentality in order to discover how accounting worked in two government‐supported organizations independently of the discourses that pervaded each one. Drawing on the reticulation of the space, the use of rules and accounting from the governmental perspective, we analyse those institutions. The article concludes that the reticulation of space is an essential apparatus to exert action at a distance; the rules are a type of government technology; and, overall, accounting is a practice for the mastery of the population independently from the discourse of the institution.
ISSN:0001-3072
1467-6281
DOI:10.1111/j.1467-6281.2005.00175.x