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

Accounting History,  Feb 2008  by Abraham, Anne

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The next section of this article addresses the microhistorical method. The third section describes the GGA and its social, cultural and historical setting. The fourth section reveals the background of Mrs O'Malley Wood and outlines her major contributions to the GGA. The final part suggests conclusions that can be drawn from this study and also considers the limitations of microhistory.

The microhistorical method

The concept of microhistory evolved in the late 1970s and 1980s among a group of historians associated with the Italian journal Quaderni Storici. Under the influence of Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg, microhistorians began to explain ideas, attitudes or cultural patterns by intensive examination of a person, an event or a locality. Indeed "by its very focus on individuals and groups, microhistory forced scholars to take individuals seriously as historical agents. It forced them to re-examine the cultural forces that shaped individual mentalities" (Bell, 1997, p.40). Microhistory was seen as a turning towards the study of "individual life experiences and how they could be probed for deeper meaning" (Hoffman, 1997, p.viii). Textual and ethnographic analysis, supplemented by social, political and economic data drawn from public and private records enabled microhistorians to create accounts (see for example, Le Roy Ladurie, 1975/1980; Ginzburg, 1980; Levi, 1985/1988, 2001; Reay, 1996) of previously "obscure people and unusual occurrences" (University of Connecticut, 1999). This article reveals one such hitherto "obscure person", Mrs O'Malley Wood, and "unusual occurrences", opposition to her fiscally sound recommendations, by drawing on archival data from organizational, genealogical and government records to partially reconstruct her time as treasurer of a nonprofit organization and to seek to understand apparent anomalies.

Iggers (1997) asserted that the advent of microhistory arose as postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject. Likewise, Burke (1992b) contended that microhistory can be seen as a reaction against the history of well-known social trends. Indeed, microhistory tends "to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual" (Magnusson, 2006). Taking a microscopic view of how these individuals fashioned their lives in the face of the conditions and constraints that confronted them has prompted microhistorians to "to use their powers of imagination and their narrative skills to make sense of events, and even to fill in gaps in the archival records" (Bell, 1997, p.40). Similarly, this study of Mrs O'Malley Wood, an "outlier" as opposed to an "exemplary individual" (Tilly, 1998, p.38), has involved filling in gaps in archival records. To this end, apparent subjective assumptions have been made particularly in relation to social and culture influences to allow readers to follow the process of the research and "to judge whether or not the proposed hypotheses are valuable" (Egholm, 2000).