Accountability by the accountable self: The case of Leone Wollemborg

Abstract

The accounting history literature has mostly concentrated on depicting how accountability practices evolve with respect to the organisational and social contexts, leaving at the margins explorations of the role of the ‘accountable self’ in this process. To extend this literature, the present study examines how the economist and landowner Leone Wollemborg (1859–1932) acted as an ‘accountable self’, explaining his own actions to the ‘other’, to promote a new organisational model aimed at solving the credit issue affecting the rural population. Based on archival material, the article explores Wollemborg’s biography and develops a content analysis of his discourses. The findings show that, by making a pervasive use of face-to-face narrative accountability, Wollemborg obtained trust and engagement of external potential stakeholders, thus expanding the rural credit cooperatives (Raiffeisen-style). This research facilitates understanding of the relevance for the initiator of a new organisational model to act as an ‘accountable self’.