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Expenses in different kind of aid.
Source publication
This paper aims to extend the knowledge about how ad hoc accounting and accountability practices arose and were used in the past to face a situation of crisis in the context of local government. With this purpose, it addresses a health public problem in a specific context, the yellow fever epidemic in Cadiz in 1800. The specific characteristics of...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International 59 government on January 20th 1801: Expenses of the epidemic from August 20 th to December 31 st 1800 to pay with the funds collected. This document provided with a chronological detail of the payments made, by distinguishing four different categories or kind of expenses: (i) Doctors and pharmacists, (ii) Meat, water, vegetable stew, salt, coal, firewood and employees involved in the delivery of broth among poor sick people, (iii) Tools and alms for the poor sick people in the Royal Prison and (iv) Alms in cash distributed both to hospitals and to poor people of the neighbourhood with the collaboration of their parish priests (Table 1 shows the amount spent in each of these categories). A similar practice based on the classification of expenses according to their nature had been already used in the 18th century by the Santa Marta Hospital, a charitable institution whose mission was to feed every day about 45-50 poor people (Hernández, 2015). ...Context 2
... Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International 59 government on January 20th 1801: Expenses of the epidemic from August 20 th to December 31 st 1800 to pay with the funds collected. This document provided with a chronological detail of the payments made, by distinguishing four different categories or kind of expenses: (i) Doctors and pharmacists, (ii) Meat, water, vegetable stew, salt, coal, firewood and employees involved in the delivery of broth among poor sick people, (iii) Tools and alms for the poor sick people in the Royal Prison and (iv) Alms in cash distributed both to hospitals and to poor people of the neighbourhood with the collaboration of their parish priests (Table 1 shows the amount spent in each of these categories). A similar practice based on the classification of expenses according to their nature had been already used in the 18th century by the Santa Marta Hospital, a charitable institution whose mission was to feed every day about 45-50 poor people (Hernández, 2015). ...Citations
... Also during the epidemic, the accounting of the City Council identified the parish priests who distributed alms around the neighbourhood, putting their lives at risk, while that of the Hospice captured the exceptional work of volunteers, employees and board members. Altogether, these inscriptions helped define their identities as caring people, and especially heroic for collaborating during the epidemic (Domínguez, 1979), in contrast to the behaviour of other residents who tried to flee from the focus of contagion, even dodging their responsibilities (Capelo and Araújo, 2019). ...
... Later, in 1800, it agreed to start publicly distributing the annual accounts and the monthly statement on new inmates. When the epidemic came to an end, the effectiveness of the charitable work organised by the City Council was demonstrated to the public by an ad hoc report (Fig. 6) which explained the source of the funds administered by the City Council (Capelo and Araújo, 2019). Based on the daily information received from neighbourhood commissaries, as well as the accumulated information sent by different institutions, the report provided a breakdown of the total number of sick, healed and deceased in each of the charitable establishments, hospitals, religious communities and neighbourhoods of the city. ...
... Similarly, the City Council relied on its accounts to formulate a discourse focused on comparing the number of deaths in Cádiz and Seville, and the hospital and non-hospital mortality rates (Capelo and Araújo, 2019). ...
This article analyses the role played by accounting in the social order, drawing inspiration from the works of Ezzamel and the literature related to accounting inscriptions and discourse. To that end, our research examines four Spanish charitable organisations with which the Catholic Church collaborated closely in the final years of the eighteenth century and early years of the nineteenth, a period during which enlightened ideas about how to deal with poverty threatened the traditional role of the Church.
Based on this study, we argue that accounting, as a relevant part of the discursive practices of the dominant actors in charitable activity, (i) structures society, creating social spaces in which it inscribes people, and establishes links and distances between these spaces, (ii) constructs the truth about the achievements of charitable organisations and the charitable work of donors/collaborators, and (iii) collaborates in strengthening power relations and promotes both social equilibrium and the social mobility of individuals and groups.
... Accounting for exceptional decision-making at the organizational level Accounting research has only recently started to deal with natural disasters and humanitarian crises (Capelo and Ara ujo, 2019;Lai et al., 2014;Leider et al., 2017;Sargiacomo et al., 2014;Sargiacomo, 2015) as well as financial crises (Bracci et al., 2015;Barbera et al., 2017Barbera et al., , 2020 trying to determine the role of accounting in such circumstances from a critical and interpretive perspective (Sargiacomo, 2014), the way in which accountability could enhance a common trust towards the recovery actions (Sciulli, 2018), as well as the support of auditing in monitoring recovery processes. However, these studies deal with natural or humanitarian disasters in very limited and specific areas of the world (Matilal and Adhikari, 2019). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the themes emerging from the first studies exploring accounting, accountability and management practices during the COVID-19 pandemic and coming from a diversity of experiences, across countries, organizations and individuals. In so doing, the paper gives an overview of the most recent findings about the role of accounting and accountability in times of crisis that are hosted in this special issue of Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal (AAAJ).
Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws together and identifies emerging themes related to the current COVID-19 pandemic and its impacts on accounting, accountability and management practices and considers how the studies in this issue extend one’s knowledge of accounting and contribute to accounting research.
Findings
Three emerging themes are drawn and their contribution to accounting scholarship is discussed. The first theme deals with the role of accounting and numbers in supporting governmental responses to COVID-19. The second theme considers accounting practices used to make exceptional decisions at the organizational level in times of crisis. The third theme addresses a relevant frontier of research into accounting and inequalities.
Practical implications
In considering the diverse contributions of this special issue, the paper points out how uncertainty and change can impact the design, use and understanding of accounting, management and accountability practices and can be accepted by scholars and practitioners as part of such practices.
Originality/value
This paper provides a timely and comprehensive picture of the first reflections and research findings on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on one’s interpretation of accounting, accountability and management practices.
By examining a Spanish Catholic charity that operated in an unregulated environment in Cádiz between 1798 and 1801, this article analyses the motivations for discharging accountability to stakeholders and the factors that influence information disclosure. Drawing on stakeholder theory and not-for-profit accountability literature, we show how the organisation’s founders, managers and board members translated their feeling of responsibility and the accounting insight prevailing in their socio-economic context to this charity setting. Their efforts to discharge accountability and disclose information focused largely on upward stakeholders, but they also discharged accountability to aid recipients. Nevertheless, they restricted the information they revealed because of the Catholic doctrine about secret almsgiving and concerns about the protection of poor people’s privacy and fear of public shame. These restrictions may have been somewhat counterbalanced by the charity’s observable actions and by social interaction among board members, donors, and beneficiaries enabled through physical proximity and social ties.
The authors propose a critical reinterpretation of a case study embedded in the historical period of post-WWII in Southern Italy. This period is characterised by relevant socio-political and economic consequences at a global scale, and it has been scarcely investigated from a business perspective. The authors consider the connections between war damages accounting, adverse collateral events, and agricultural accounting as tools to claim for social changes. The analysis specifically concerns the damages caused to the warehouses of hemp growers in the province of Caserta (Campania region, Italy). This area was known as Terra di Lavoro (‘land of work’ (authors’ translation)) since the Middle Ages to outline the poor conditions of hemp growers. The features of the accounting analysed herein, in the light of neo-institutional theory, show how it was used as a technology for problem-solving and a potential trigger for the agrarian reform of 1950.
Este artículo tiene por objetivo estudiar la gestión sanitaria que hicieron las autoridades locales de Cádiz durante la epidemia de fiebre amarilla de 1800. Con este propósito, el trabajo analiza el desarrollo global de este brote y las consecuencias que tuvo sobre la población gaditana, estudia las primeras medidas adoptadas y examina las disposiciones tomadas para erradicar la epidemia. Las fuentes utilizadas en esta investigación proceden del Archivo Histórico Municipal de Cádiz, el Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz, el Archivo de la Catedral de Cádiz y el Archivo Histórico Nacional, así como la amplia gama de literatura médica que surgió en torno a esta enfermedad. Del análisis realizado se concluye que la alta mortalidad se puede explicar por la confusión inicial, la tardanza en la toma de medidas efectivas y el caos social generado tras la huida de gran parte de la población.
