Responding to calls to instate the visual in accounting history research, this study utilizes photographic images to reveal the role of accounting in the attempt to preserve an ideal (ruralism) and an institution (the family farm) in the United States . These elemental features of the American way of life were threatened during the interwar depression, resulting in governmental programs to secure their restoration. The analysis of official imagery reveals how the accounting prescriptions attending state intervention in agriculture were deemed conducive to the fortification of the economic, social and political foundations of agrarian living. Documentary photographs propagated the notion that accounting facilitated companionate marriage and the inclusive family. They also suggested that accounting was a focus for encouraging the communitarian endeavor, democratic participation and receptivity to state interventionism considered necessary to preserve the rural mode of living.

“Decision usefulness ” has been the organizing criterion for accounting policy and accounting scholarship for over forty years. Its authority however, was not gained over time through explicit theory development or argumentation, but was instead “born full grown ” (Staubus, 1999, p. 163)as a conceptual “takeover in the dead of night ” (p. 338). In essence, the concept of decision usefulness assumed a central place as the rationale for accounting choice by stealth rather than by careful argument or based on empirical evidence. The lack of an extended period of argumentation and debate over the meaning of decision usefulness meant its conceptual weaknesses were allowed to remain remarked upon but never resolved. In this paper we argue that as the central focus defining and guiding accounting policy, decision usefulness has not proven any more useful than earlier, allegedly normative theories of accounting did. The recent debates on IFRS versus GAAP provide vivid testament to the inadequacy of decision usefulness as a criterion for selecting among alternative accounting choices. We briefly examine the history of decision usefulness and its emergence as the chief criterion for selecting policy. We then argue that in light of recent developments in our

We present the first large‐sample empirical evidence on U.S. auditors' responses to changes in entity‐level audit risk during 2006–2007, the period leading up to the financial crisis of 2008–2009. Treating fiscal year 2005 engagements as a pre‐crisis benchmark, we find that audit attention during fiscal year 2006 and 2007 bank audit engagements shifted in line with the shifting audit risks. One implication of these findings is that auditors were able to recognize and respond to financial statement impacts of the macroeconomic shocks that unfolded during the lead‐up to the crisis. Another implication is that auditors' failure to issue advance warnings of increasing auditee riskiness during the time leading up to the financial crisis more likely reflects limitations of extant accounting and auditing rules rather than a lack of auditor awareness or attention to those risks.