Examines how and why accounting is so important to contemporary social and economic life.

1. Accounting as social and institutional practice: an introduction Peter Miller; 2. Early double-entry bookkeeping and the rhetoric of accounting calculation Grahame Thompson; 3. Writing, examining, disciplining: the genesis of accounting's modern power Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve; 4. Governing the calculable person Peter Miller and Ted O'Leary; 5. Accountancy and the First World War Anne Loft; 6. Accounting and labour: integrations and disintegrations Philip Bougen; 7. The politics of economic measurement: the rise of the 'productivity problem' in the 1940s Jim Tomlinson; 8. Corporate control in large British companies: the intersection of management accounting and industrial relations in postwar Britain Peter Armstrong; 9. Value added accounting and national economic policy Anthony Hopwood, Stuart Burchell and Colin Clubb; 10. Management by accounting Brendan McSweeny; 11. Regulating accountancy in the UK: episodes in a changing relationship between the state and the profession David Cooper, Keith Robson, Tony Puxty and Hugh Wilmott; 12. The audit society Michael Power