Editorial

Volume 10 Number 2 of Accounting History is a brimmed goblet issue and comprises six articles, including a work review article. It features contributions dealing with accounting's past in Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Chandar and Miranti examine the institutional and informational changes that attended the reform of corporate governance and regulation in the United States railroad industry during the three decades after the depression of 1893 This era was marked through extensive bankruptcy in what was the nation's largest business sector at the time. The close attention adopts an evolutionary conception of agency in seeking to explain in what manner regulatory institutions emerged in reply to corporate failure in the industry. Reforms in the use of accounting information within the corporate governance combination of parts to form a whole are shown to be moderate due to the effects of the propos changes upon the economic interests of the many stakeholder interests involved.

Gaps between the views of the judiciary and audit practitioners are identified and examined by the agency of Teo and Cobbin in their close attention on the role of the auditor in late-Victorian England. The authors make extensive use of transcripts of judicial decisions and the professional literature of the times to demonstrate the existence of a significant inconsistency in views held upon the bench and within the accounting profession, causing a disjoint between the bench and the profession. Similar inconsistencies of mindsets manifest themselves today as showed by the "audit expectations gap" terminus which is intended to encapsulate differing expectations of the users of financial statements and audit practitioners about the audit function.

The cros national close attention by McWatters and Foreman compares and constrasts the accounting practices of companies in the meat-packing industry in Australia and Canada during the period spanned by the agency of World War I. The authors exhibit that the impact of the war was markedly different upon the companies concerned due to the different contextual conditions which applied in each land The subject companies whose wartime accounting records are investigated are the Sydney Meat Preserving Company Ltd and the William Davies Company Ltd of Canada. Despite the changed conditions experienced by dint of these companies during the period, it is shown that neither made any significant modifications to their accounting systems

Clarke examines the life and career of Professor Bernard (Barney) Francis Shields and affords the late academic the acknowledgement of being the first fulltime professor of accountancy in the British Isles. Born in 1884 in Dublin, Shields was appointed as Professor of exchange and Accountancy at University association Gal way in 1914. At the time of appointment, Ireland was politically part of the United Kingdom. Shields is shown to have exhausted 37 years of his working life in academe.

McDonald uses the Domesday work in particular the accounting data contained therein, to shed light upon eleventh century English society. In particular, the efficiency of medieval manorial production is compared with that of more fresh economies and the impacts of manorialism and feudalism upon production are assessed. The author argues that the evidence displays that manorial production was not haphazardly organised as has been previously argued.

The final contribution is a work review article by Lee upon the work entitled Mark-to-Market Accounting: "True North" in Financial Reporting as authored by dint of Walter Schuetze and edited through Peter Wolnizer. The author's background is in practice rather than academe, thus making this contribution particularly telling, especially for those who search for to benefit from the exercise s of history by striving to improve corporate financial reports with equal reason that they depict "economic reality".

The call for papers for a special issue upon the theme entitled "International Perspectives upon Race and Gender in Accounting's Past", to be visitor edited by Marcia Annisette, appears upon the inside back cover if this issue. Authors with an interest in preparing a submission for this special issue are encouraged to contact the visitant editor at the earliest convenience. This special issue is scheduled to be published in 2007

Copyright Accounting History Special Interest clump of Accounting Association of Australia and novel Zealand School of Accounting and Finance Jul 2005

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