This article aims at describing the sixteenth-seventeenth century Jesuit Japan mission’s finances through its accounting documents. The article demonstrates that accounting documents played a key role in the dialogue with Rome over the mission’s financial management and needs. Portraying a mission dependent on Europe and India to secure its resources, the accounts raise the question of how religious orders managed funds on a global scale. This article provides a detailed analysis of a type of source specific to the Society of Jesus, namely its catalogues. While it was common for overseas missions to purchase goods from Europe or other distant places, the Japan mission was singular in that it also had highly dispersed sources of income, spreading between Europe and Asia. This article demonstrates how the Jesuits of Japan articulated these resources and their disbursements, so that they could meet the material and spiritual needs of their evangelical project. The study of the catalogues thus reveals the challenges faced by a mission trying to manage its finances between Europe and Asia. It questions the order’s ability to design and enforce an administrative and institutional framework that could fit the complex case of globally deployed religious missions.

The economic system sustaining the Propaganda Fide’s missions in East Asia relied on the shipping of silver from Europe and the colonies; loans from European and Chinese merchants, and religious institutions; spogli of deceased missionaries; rents from real estate and land in Asia and elsewhere; charitable donations and “foundations” by European princes and ecclesiastics, Chinese officials, and Qing emperors; and interests from deposits in the Iberian system of the Casas de Misericordia. The management of the economic and logistical workings of the missionary machine was in the hands of a procurator in the Pearl River Delta. Financial leverage became a way to direct and control the missions from afar and was used both by the Propaganda Fide in Rome and by the procurators in China to influence their subjects in East Asia. Such authority did not go uncontested, but oversight over money afforded superiors the possibility to render rebellious individuals more pliable. This framework relied on global trade networks of trade, finance, and ecclesiastical backing, and the strategic positioning of the procurator in south China – amidst tensions between central authority and local realities – highlights the complex dynamics of governance, resistance, and survival in the missionary enterprise.

El análisis tributario de la España colonial en el XVIII se fundamenta en la investigación de las Cajas Reales. La literatura científica se centra en la recopilación de información de los sumarios de los libros comunes y de caja. Siguiendo la línea de las últimas publicaciones, se identifican deficiencias en dicha información. Utilizando datos inéditos de los restantes libros contables, como los manuales, se completan los cargos para la Caja Real de Santiago (Chile) y se depuran las series publicadas eliminando cantidades recaudadas años anteriores y consideradas cargos del corriente. Los resultados sugieren que las recaudaciones no fueron tan elevadas como se ha asumido tradicionalmente. Se resalta así la importancia de la contabilidad en la reconstrucción de la historia económica colonial.

This paper examines, from a management accounting perspective, the efficacy of the dominant ‘restricted’ funding structure in the international development NGO sector in terms of overall sector effectiveness, and whether it is the most appropriate means of funding NGOs. The objective is to encourage theoretical debate around the tensions highlighted between external accountability for funding and overall value-for-money delivered by individual development NGOs and the wider international development sector. From unique access to three internationally recognised major NGOs, our case studies reveal management accounting as broadly homogenous, with some nuanced distinctions both within and between the cases; but the scope of management accounting emerges as relatively limited. This is despite the NGOs utilising complex accounting software, employing qualified accounting staff, and having a large annual income. Using the broad principles of systems theory to frame our approach, this paper suggests that due to the ‘restricted’ nature of funding awarded to NGOs by institutional donors, accounting is dominated by external accountability reporting to the detriment of management accounting. These relatively novel data on management accounting practices at international development NGOs help illustrate how, potentially, NGOs are missing opportunities to utilise, or even improve, value-for-money in terms of how various program themes, geographic areas or time periods are delivering better or worse discernible impact for the money spent.

Volunteer contributions in the production of services are an important resource internationally. However, few countries include volunteer contributions in their national accounts, even though many encourage their populations to engage in volunteering. At the organizational level, many nonprofit organizations using volunteers often limit their input to a footnote in annual reports acknowledging their contribution; few estimate their value in financial terms. As a result, their financial accounts lack information upon which to base decisions affecting the organizations and the communities they serve. Additional information is required to assess the impact of volunteers in individual nonprofits as well as the sector as a whole. This study focuses on Canada, one of the few countries that include volunteers in the national accounts, to examine to what extent nonprofit organizations estimate a financial value for these contributions and include this in their financial statements. This paper reports the results of an online survey of 661 nonprofits from across Canada. In order to understand why some organizations keep records for volunteer contributions and quantify them, two sets of explanatory factors are explored: organizational characteristics and the attitude of the executive director. We find larger organizations were more likely to engage in record keeping and estimating volunteer value, as were organizations with a relatively large group of volunteers and volunteer programs. The attitude of the executive director is important in determining which organizations engage in these practices.

Stretching for 1.5km and consisting of approximately 5200 precisely aligned holes, Monte Sierpe in southern Peru is a remarkable construction that likely dates to at least the Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000–1400) and saw continued use by the Inca (AD 1400–1532). Yet its function remains uncertain. Here, the authors report on new analyses of drone imagery and sediment samples that reveal numerical patterns in layout, potential parallels with Inca knotted-string records and the presence of crops and wild plants. All this, the authors argue, suggests that Monte Sierpe functioned as a local, Indigenous system of accounting and exchange.

Investment banks collaborated with health care entrepreneurs and managers in the 1990s to add a costly layer of investor-owned corporations to the US medical delivery system. In capitalizing and consolidating physician practices, publicly traded Physician Practice Management Companies (PPMCs) incorporated elements of the broader capitalist economy. Companies such as PhyCor, MedPartners, and FPA Medical Management turned to the equity and debt markets to generate shareholder profits and capital for acquisitions. Contemporary theories of financial economics reinforced their activities. PPMCs collapsed after shareholder lawsuits accused them of reporting false figures to the SEC and banks withdrew their credit. Physicians were both accomplices and victims in the process that made the medical delivery system less equitable, less effective, and more expensive. Although this experiment in medical capitalism failed, it widened the door for Wall Street to build new ways to profit from health care.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of managerial capitalism is well known, with some arguing that MacIntyrean thought is antithetical to contemporary capitalist business. Nevertheless, substantial efforts have been taken to demonstrate how different business activities constitute MacIntyrean practices, which points to an incoherence at the heart of MacIntyrean business ethics scholarship. This article proposes a way of bridging these perspectives, suggesting a reimagined MacIntyrean approach to business that is thoroughly ‘practice-led.’ A detailed comparison of accounting and management shows that while neither are practices in ‘good order,’ they differ in significant ways: where management does not meet the criteria for a MacIntyrean practice, accounting is a ‘distorted’ practice. This leads to a categorisation of practice-led business activity, whereby the traditional tasks of management are subsumed, shared or subordinated to practices and practitioners. Insights on how this can be implemented are drawn from the ‘communities of practice’ literature and a consideration of professions.

Geoffrey Colin Harcourt’s work on the interface between accountancy and economics is a part of his legacy that is less well-known than his work on the capital controversies. This paper argues that the analytical findings of this research effort are an important and integral part of Harcourt’s overall research programme. In this paper, we review Harcourt’s work on the relation between economics and accounting from the time of his undergraduate thesis to 1969, the date of the publication with Robert Parker of the edited volume Readings in the Concept and Measurement of Income. This paper intends to offer insights on (A) the evolution of Harcourt’s thought during this period and a survey of the significant contributions he made to research in this field during this time and (B) the legacy of his approach and findings. We argue that his ideas in this domain offer important insights in doing post-Keynesian economics in the Harcourt mould. We find that Harcourt’s insights on the issues relating to the accounting rate of profit as used by economists remain relevant to today, as well as his implicit suggestions on how to deal with the complexities of the problems that ensue for the theorist, practical economist, businessman, and policy advisor. Harcourt’s work suggests that we should not aim to replace one monolithic way of seeing things with another, indicating that the useful definition of key concepts and tools is determined by the problem and hence by the policy question one wants to answer.

This article analyzes the accounting treatment of sales and purchasing at the Fengshengtai Company (丰盛泰号), a salt trader from Shanxi Province. We find evidence of “dualled entry” bookkeeping in that all transactions were recorded twice. Crucially, each set of dualled entries was recorded in two distinct accounts. For example, cash transactions were recorded in a “cash flowing account” as well as a specialized flowing account. We thus argue that, in light of clues from other records, a system of indigenous Chinese double-entry bookkeeping may well have been developed at Fengshengtai and other Shanxi merchants. Our study is based on Fengshengtai's surviving account books, a collection of primary sources spanning 1854 to 1881, that have recently become available to scholars.