L’evoluzione dell’ordinamento contabile nell’Indrizzo degli Economi di Angelo Pietra: una prospettiva situazionale

This study investigates the possible relations between the social and organizational context, on the one hand, and the evolution of accounting principles and techniques on the other, on the basis of the hypothesis that, in order to understand the conditions which have produced significant developments in both the practice and the aims of accounting systems and principles, it is necessary to bring out the (mainly) social and organizational determinants of this development. Taking Gray’s model (1988) as a starting point, we have tried to identify the interconnections between those variables held to be significant and then to move on to an analysis of the external and internal context, following the classification proposed by Chenall (2003). In order to demonstrate our hypothesis, the study considered the accounting system outlined in the rare treatise Indrizzo degli economi di Angelo Pietra (1586) as a typical historical case study, placing this in the author’s environmental context. From this perspective the analysis focuses not so much on the features of Renaissance accounting that can still be found in “modern” practice but on the fact that “accounting continually […] become what it was not” (Hopwood, 1987), due to the changed social and organizational conditions of the historical context.