The Historical Evolution of Research in Accounting. National and European Context

Abstract

Driven by the desire to create added value in a very generous but very difficult field of the history of accounting in Romania, and wanting to generate useful knowledge both for the academic and for the practical fields, this article aims to demonstrate the intrinsic link between economic and social development and the development of accounting through historical approach.  In this context, history is not regarded as a sequence of facts, resulting in inevitable cause-effect relationships. On the contrary, it is something we have sought to avoid at all times in order to emphasize a procedural approach in which events can be analyzed in an interpretative manner. Given that history means a chain of cause and effect facts, we must draw attention to the fact that this is an ideal situation, from which we start in order to simplify reasoning. In fact, to the extent that the causes could have been objectively known, history would not have been rewritten so many times. For this reason, we prefer to approach history as an essentially discontinuous phenomenon, following major trends, speculations being what ensures the continuity of the historical process.