Mitchell Stein

• Western University

In 1856, the State of Ohio began an enumeration of its population to count and identify people with disabilities. This paper examines the ethical role of the accounting profession in this project, which supported the transatlantic eugenics movement and its genocidal attempts to eliminate disabled persons from the population. We use a theoretical ap...

Purpose The authors examine how political players attempt to rationalise arguments for and against the expansion of auditing into governmental affairs, and how state audit authorities respond to politically motivated boundary work. This study is motivated by growing evidence of political involvement in attempts to both expand and undermine state au...

Previous research has highlighted the crucial roles that accounting plays in both the construction and development of the State. However, only limited attention has been paid to how accounting is both conceived and implemented as a technology of government. Taking a historical perspective, and through extensive archival analysis of the Canadian exp...

This article investigates Elmer G Beamer’s (1909–2000) activities at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) during a 30-year period beginning in the 1950s, using a theoretical lens from the sociology of professions literature. Beamer was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1909 and trained as an accountant with Haskins & Sells afte...

Recent work has called for more research to be carried out exploring how professional projects develop in conjunction with wider processes of institutional change. We respond to these calls here by analysing the way in which tax professionals have responded to a major disruption at the field level. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Dev...

This paper explores the role of accounting in the attempted reform of the corporation during the “progressive era” in the United States. Focusing on the activities of three institutional bodies in the early twentieth century, the paper documents how their repeated recourse to “publicity,” which relied crucially on accounting technologies, failed to...

Alvin R. Jennings (1905-1990) was a rare breed of an accountant. He was trained as a practitioner and rose to become a managing partner at Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery, but he kept a constant watch on the academic field of accounting research. Jennings served on the influential American Institute of Accountants’ Committee on Auditing Procedure...

This paper investigates Elmer G. Beamer’s (1909-2000) activities at the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants during a thirty-year period beginning in the 1950s, using a theoretical lens from the sociology of professions literature. Beamer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1909 and trained as an accountant with Haskins & Sells after grad...

Calls for greater transparency of accounting information were consistent in media discourse after the accounting crisis early this century. Our analysis of the media suggests different emergent meanings were associated with these calls of transparency and an underlying ‘taken for grantedness’. We examine how this ‘taken for grantedness’ contributed...

Accountants who have contributed to the professional, academic, and institutional discourse of their discipline are rare. Individuals such as A. C. Littleton (Bedford & Ziegler, 1975; Edwards & Salmonson, 1961; Gilbert, 2000), Frank Sewell Bray (Forrester, 1982; Parker, 1980), and George O. May (Grady, 1962; Paton, 1981; Stabler & Dressel, 1981) ar...