The Evolutionary Dimension of Pandemic Management: An Italian Historical Case

The authors, considering accounting practice as a technology rather than a technique, attribute to accounting an interpretative paradigm focused on the variables of the theory of technology-acceptance, highlighting how this can generate strategic-responses. The case-study of the Naples plague in 1656 is studied at both synchronic and diachronic levels, analysing at documental level primary and secondary sources, in order to identify the breaking points of institutional social practice, as represented by the adverse reaction to the imposition of lazarettos accounting, which, due to urgent needs, was requested by law but was not implemented in practice. These conditions allowed the organisational dimension to prevail over the accounting one, although the latter was already widespread at the mercantile level. The main character of the rituals in burial activities related to the accounting of the dead appears (1656) to have transformed transiently from a numerical dimension into physical accounting (bones in mass graves).