The struggle to develop accounting practices in the Australian Girl Guides, 1945—9: a microhistorical approach

Abstract

There has been limited accounting history research in the areas of nonprofit organizations and women in a non-business environment. This article addresses these two gaps by considering accounting history in a large female-managed nonprofit organization, the Australian Girl Guides Association (GGA). In order to do this the article uses a microhistorical reconstruction of an individual to penetrate underlying motivations (Parker, 1999, p.31) and to allow the reader “to draw conclusions from a story that illustrates a fragment of peoples' lives and activities” (Williams, 1999, p.75) by revealing what would otherwise be unknown about the struggle to develop appropriate accounting practices in the context of organizational culture and history. It discloses that pertinent recommendations by GGA's fourth treasurer, Mrs O'Malley Wood, were ignored by management in a fiscally irresponsible manner. This article demonstrates that by focusing close attention on a seemingly minor individual, the researcher is able to discover the possible constraints that shaped human behaviour at a specific moment in history.