Accounting history and the emperor's new clothes: A response to "Knowing more as knowing less?..."

              Tyson: The Emperor’s New Clothes 159
Accounting Historians Journal
Vol. 27, No. 1
June 2000
Thomas N. Tyson
ST. JOHN FISHER COLLEGE
ACCOUNTING HISTORY AND THE
EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES:
A RESPONSE TO “KNOWING MORE
AS KNOWING LESS? . . . ”
Abstract: Hoskin and Macve (H&M) continue to accredit certain
events in the early 1840s as enabling the creation of norm-based
accounting and its use to control labor and improve productivity at
the Springfield Armory (SA). Although critics have refuted H&M’s
interpretation of these events and reproached their use of inflated
language, H&M maintain their unique perspective with undimin-ished
fervor. This rejoinder further questions the validity of H&M’s
perspective of U.S. accounting history. It identifies the many con-ventional
business historians who refute it and emphasizes that no
other evidence has been presented to indicate that norm-based ac-counting
was ever employed in the U.S. before the early 1900s. It
also describes how H&M have tried to bolster their position by cit-ing
several contemporary and more critical scholars who in fact
refute it. More substantively, the paper emphasizes that the core
debate between H&M and their critics is not simply over the timing
of particular events at SA. Rather, it centers on the nature of histori-cal
evidence and the distinction between history and historicism.
INTRODUCTION
Hoskin and Macve (H&M) continue to argue that certain
events at the Springfield Armory (SA) have been largely unrec-ognized
for marking the first use of accounting to control labor
and improve productivity in the U.S. Their core belief, un-changed
from earlier papers [H&M, 1988, 1996], is that the
confluence of performance norms and managerial discipline
first occurred in 1841 at SA and transformed accounting’s role
from mercantilism to “managerialism.” In their latest paper,
H&M seek to rebut critics of this uniquely Foucaldian perspec-tive
of U.S. accounting history.
In previous papers, I have argued that H&M distorted the
historical record [Tyson, 1993] and refuted their contentions
that 1) norm-based accounting effectuated SA’s subsequent pro-ductivity
increases [Tyson, 1990], and that 2) accounting infor-