The genesis of accountability: The west point connections

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Abstract

We focus on the genesis of the new managerialism in U.S. business and factories in the nineteenth century and re-examine the published histories of the U.S. armories and the railroads. We trace the influence in both arenas of the engineering/military graduates from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, who represent and reproduce the meticulous “grammatocentric” and “panoptic” system for human accountability introduced there in the years after 1817. Our overall concern is to re-analyse apparently economic-rational changes in accounting and accountability in a wider frame which explains their development as aspects of a general shift in power-knowledge relations—a shift which Foucault characterised as the development of disciplinary power and which we argue originated in elite educational institutions. We propose further examination (or re-examination) of the original accounting and administrative records relating to the armories and the railroads in order to establish the precise process of historical change.

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    We gratefully acknowledge the helpful discussion and criticism of earlier drafts of this paper provided by participants at the British Accounting Association annual conference at Aberystwyth in April 1986 and at the American Accounting Association annual meeting in New York in August 1986, in particular David Forrester, Richard Vangermeersch and, above all, H. Thomas Johnson. We remain responsible for the views expressed and the defects of our exposition of them.

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