Accounting for Hegemony: Fascist Ideology and the Shifting Roles of Accounting at the University of Ferrara and the Alla Scala Opera House (1922-1943)

Accounting researchers have shown how accounting is implicated in the creation of power relations. Most studies assume a unidirectional relationship between the ideological beliefs of those in power and accounting practices. The study adopts Gramsci’s understanding of power relations to analyse how Italian Fascists enlisted accounting information to ensure that two important organisations, the University of Ferrara and the Alla Scala Opera House, would become a conduit for the diffusion of Fascist ideology. The paper shows how there is not an uncomplicated, unidirectional relationship between ideology and accounting. The illusorily neutral appearance of accounting allows it to be adapted to play different roles and acquire different meanings even in the achievement of the same set of ideological beliefs. The study also shows how Gramsci’s thought offers an alternative reading of power relations to that of Foucault and Marx and considers a set of ideological beliefs which are scarcely analysed in accounting history studies.