Laura Maran

Saint Anna’s Hospital in Ferrara, Italy: Accounting and organizational change during the Devolution

This article provides insights into organizational and accounting changes at Saint Anna’s Hospital in Ferrara (Italy). These changes were driven by a wider environmental change which occured in 1598 when the Dukedom of Ferrara was devolved to the Papal State. This brought about an institutional and political shift that affected the overall society and its main institutions, including the hospital. Research material was drawn from State and private archives, including the original sixteenth-century accounting books, statutes and organization manuals. The article adds to the sparse literature on accounting practices in non-Anglo-Saxon countries in under-researched centuries. More specifically it provides an internal perspective on understanding the definition of responsibilities among organizational levels as well as accounting development within Saint Anna’s Hospital both before and after an episode of significant institutional change.

Public sector benchmarking: an application to Italian health district activity plans

Purpose – The paper seeks to suggest an application of the benchmarking technique on the content evaluation of the health district activity plans (HDAPs).Design/methodology/approach – A literature review on benchmarking leads to the definition of a benchmarking process, which is utilized to evaluate and compare the contents of the HDAPs. These documents link the planning activity of the health districts of a region to the objectives comprehensively established at higher levels. Consequently, to define a common level of comparison of the HDAPs, the contents of the texts are evaluated through an in‐depth study of the specific law prescriptions and the adoption of an hermeneutic point of view. The HDAPs collected among the health districts of a single Italian Region represent the empirical data set and their specific benchmarking involves the definition of benchmark scales and placement of “best practices”.Findings – Benchmarking can improve planning capabilities of the health districts pointing out their mo...

Environmental management and regulation: pitfalls of environmental accounting?

Purpose – The present paper is aimed at arguing the fallacy of those political arguments when an economical evaluation of those advantages is implicated. The present analysis will unearth the partisan nature of the specific accounting rules and principles to fill up the Italian financial reporting in spite of any environmental sensitivity. The paper attempts to suggest a mediation through a comprehensive view on hegemonic discourses of environmental management and their counter‐evidences of accounting practices about environmental management.Design/methodology/approach – The discussion is pivoted on the counter‐evidences of the present management tools both at the level of financial reporting and analytical accounting.Findings – The evidences stress the limits of the accounting regulation, since the categories of costs in the financial report scheme open a few possibilities to distinguish the environmental costs. Those considerations are an obstacle to the “internalization” of environmental externalities ...

Physiognomy of a Corte organization: How power shaped management and accounting at the Estense Corte in Ferrara, Italy, from 1385 to 1471

Corti1 have been important entities in the history of Italy, as they fostered its economic growth after the medieval period. A Corte was characterized by two main elements, the Lord and the fortifications, the latter defining the physical boundaries of the Lord’s power. The Lord had a favourable position in the Corte’s coalition nature and thanks to this advantage he could order and structure the Corte, both adhering to behavioural codes and establishing hierarchy levels and accounting rules (Papagno, 1982). This article focuses in particular on the Estense Corte of Ferrara and its physiognomy from 1385 to 1471. Through analysis of original documents contained in historical archives, an attempt is made to define the exercise of the Lord’s power and its relationship with both the Corte’s organizational structure and its accounting system. The research seeks to uncover the symbolic significance of these, and sheds light on the evolution of the organization and the intertwined development of its accounting architecture.

The 1771 and 1824 reforms of the University of Ferrara: A Foucauldian analysis of papal interests

While universities have fulfilled a central role in education, their multifaceted amalgamations of economic, political, judicial and epistemological relations of power have been paid little attention by accounting historians. This study examines the role of accounting in the power/control relationship between the Papal State and an eighteenth–nineteenth century Italian University using a Foucauldian episteme of disciplinary power and governmentality. Our findings show a separation of accounting from the exercise of education or the reproduction of a meticulous grammatocentric and panoptic system for human accountability (Hoskin and Macve, 1986, 1988; Carmona et al., 1997). However, this work reveals how supervised education gradually became a more refined tool of Christian morality, along with papal control of the institution and its expenses.

Peter Leopold's Reform of Tuscany (1774): management, organization and regulation at the local level

The eighteenth century is considered a crucial period in terms of the rise of the modern State. During this century, the logic of organization of several large European Empires began to emerge in the fragmented Italian panorama through the Lorena familys domination of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Peter Leopold of the Lorena dynasty inherited the Grand Duchy in 1765 and implemented his Reform of the Municipalities in 1774. This Reform contributed to modernizing the State and undermined most of the ancient privileges that had been established by the previous rulers of the Grand Duchy. The aim of this paper is to highlight both the government/organizational drivers of that Reform, and the relationship between central and municipal levels of governmental organization, including insights drawn from Michel Foucaults conception of governmentality in interpreting the implications of the Reform. The study is based on primary source materials from the State Archives of Florence and Galeata, and contributes to the extant, yet scarce literature on public sector management and organization of the period, and enriches understandings of the economic and accounting issues that were rationales for the Reform.

The contribution of the Italian literature to the international Accounting History literature

Italian and Anglo-Saxon accounting scholarships are rather different in their philosophical foundations and conceptual categories. Such difference has implications for Italian scholars aiming at contributing to the international accounting history (AH) literature. This work aims to qualify the contribution of Italian scholars to the AH literature. By means of a review of the AH publication patterns of Italian scholars both in Italian and English language, from 2010 to 2016, the analysis compares Italian and international outlets. Furthermore, the comparison considers the entrenched bi-lingual and cultural aspects, by highlighting the textual similarities and differences of specific contributions. With its results, the study adds to prior literature on the publishing patterns in AH, by shedding light on how Italian accounting historiography has developed in an international context. Moreover, this work highlights the challenges for Italian scholars willing to disseminate AH research outside their national context and promotes cross-country collaborations to expand the pathways, time and foci of international AH.

Accounting and Power Under Napoleon’s Occupancy of the Ferrara Municipality

The Napoleon’s rise to power in Europe (1796-1815) emphasized the passage from the Ancien Regime to the modern State that started with the French Revolution (1789). From an administrative point of view, that period was of particular interest as some characteristics of the Napoleonic re-organization of the administrative organs affected the development of the modern public administration. According to various Authors (Peters, 2008, Rouban, 2008, Spanou, 2008 and Ongaro, 2008), the Napoleonic tradition in the public administration’s rules of functioning continued to influence contemporary administrative reforms privileging the role of the public administration as the first and most important “executive arm” of the Government.The Napoleonic Empire expanded in Italy from 1796 to 1815 and marked a deep change in the public administration’s organization, accounting and accountability practices, at both the central and peripheral levels.Different patterns of accounting literature explained the emergence of practices and tools in terms of economic efficiency (e.g. Fleishman and Parker, 1991 about the emergence of competitive pressures, Johnson and Kaplan, 1987 about the definition of market prices in no-market and public contexts). In contrast to those paradigms, Ezzamel (1987) and Hopwood (1990) linked the rise and functioning of accounting practices to a power/knowledge framework, that was traced with reference to Foucault’s perspective (1977). For instance, Ezzamel (1997) related the accounting techniques to their potential of control at a distance and accountability. Hopwood (1990) pointed out that accounting was able to give visibility to certain activities and organizational actors, giving them particular meanings and significance within an administration. Thus, the social importance of the accounting enabled some social values and classes to emerge as legitimised areas/ actors of rational economic action.The aim of the present work is to explore the interrelationship between the new public administration’s accounting rules and the political values of the Napoleonic Cisalpina Republic in Italy. The interrelationship is explored with reference to the different administrative levels, included the peripheral Ferrara Municipality.The technicalities of local public accounting are studied in relation to their potential of both conveying the new political values to the administrative actors and making visible activities and new administrative classes. Thus, the analysis encompasses the Municipality accountability towards the State levels and it tries to give insights over the sources of legitimacy of the Napoleonic peripheral apparatus. The present study adopts a narrative method (Parker, 1999, Carnegie and Napier, 1996) and it benefits from primary sources about the accounting of the Napoleonic period (1797-1801) contained in the Historical State Archives of the town. The analysis intends to contribute to the literature debate on the administration’s changes introduced by Napoleon, having a focus on the Municipalities’ management and accounting systems. The study is articulated in the following sections: the first one will frame the history of Napoleonic domination in Italy and in Ferrara, the second one will describe the model of State adopted in the Cisalpina Republic, clarifying the administrative and territorial divisions and the reciprocal financial relationships in light of the original normative and accounting documents. The third section will illustrate the most important accounting innovations for the Ferrara Municipality and the forth one will define the role of the different accounting books, the rules of recording and their inter-relationships within the accounting system. The fifth section will enlighten functions and evolution of the administration of the Municipality concerning the accountability towards the State. The concluding remarks will point out the contribution of the present study on development of accounting and the State.