Historical overview of governance and its relationship with accounting and accountability

This chapter adopts a historical perspective to explore how governance intimately interconnects with both accounting and accountability. While governance issues have recently gained increasing attention, governance is a concept that has permeated various disciplines beyond economics and finance. Because of the versatility and multifaceted nature of governance, nowadays its study concerns a large variety of aspects and perspectives, especially in social and political sciences. Accounting scholars have developed a wide interest in (corporate) governance issues. These analyses largely converge on the accountability involved in governance choices, which may vary according to the role of governance actors in different organizations. Drawing on the concept of social and moral practice, this chapter offers a short history of governance, extended to social sciences; detects the interconnections among governance, accounting and accountability; and proposes a future research agenda to disclose their mutual interrelations.