Presentation [Accounting and business economics: A conceptual revisitation]

The initial intuition underlying this book is linked to the idea of revisiting some fundamental – but seemingly forgotten today – features of accounting, that is its conceptual roots in the theory of the firm (and group) as well as its raison d’être, its rationales, its relationships with the firm, economics and, ultimately, society. In fact, the way in which a firm is seen and theorised is a critical passage in how accounting is configured, and in how transactions and their financial and economic outcomes are considered and consequently treated in firm reports. Calculative business practices are actually based on “hidden” theoretical constructions which infuse accounting concepts and reporting procedures, and which implicitly emerge from the latter. Through this conceptual lens, accounting rediscovers its connection with wider bodies of knowledge which insist upon ways of looking at, and thinking of, firms in economic and societal systems. Therefore, the aim of this volume – which revisits and takes further the original studies published in The European Accounting Review from 1996 to 1998 – is to analyse the complex and diversified issues of conceptual, practical and educational nature which revolve around this “genetic” connection between accounting and business economics in many countries and with reference to major scholars who have led the establishment and the development of such thought traditions. In the following, some of the major issues of the relationship between accounting and business economics will be presented and problematized, as well as some of the emerging perspectives for the future accounting research and practice.