Accounting and the Examination: a Genealogy of Disciplinary Power

Historical elaboration of Foucault’s concept of ‘power-knowledge ” can explain both the late-medieval developments in accounting technology and why the near-universal adoption of a discourse of accountancy is delayed until the nineteenth century. It is the disciplinary techniques of elite medieval educational institutions- the new universities and their examinations-that generate new power-knowledge rela-tions. These techniques embody forms of textual rewriting (including the new ‘alphanumeric ” system) from which the accounting advances are produced and “control ” is formalised. “Double-entry ” is an aspect of these rewritings, linked also to the new writing and rewritings of money, especially the bill of exchange. By the eighteenth century accounting technologies are feeding back in a general way into educational prac-tice (e.g. in the deployment of “book-keeping ” on pupils) and this culminates in the introduction of the written examination and the mathematical mark. A new regime of “objective ” evaluation of total popula-tions, made up of individually “calculable ” subjects, is thereby engendered and then extended- appa-rently tirst in the U.S. railroads- into modern comprehensive management and financial accounting sys-tems (systems of “accountability ” embodying Foucault’s “reciprocal hierarchical observation ” and “nor-malising judgement”), while written examinations become used to legitimate the newly autonomous pro