Professor Keith Hoskin BA, MSc, PhD

• PhD in History, University of Pennsylvania, 1973
• MSc in Educational Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 1970
• BA in Classics and Modern Languages, Oxford University, 1968

Keith is currently Professor of Accounting at Birmingham Business School. From 1999 to 2011, he was Professor of Strategy and Accounting at Warwick Business School, having previously held academic posts in the fields of accounting and in comparative education and educational history. 

Keith has lectured widely in Britain and beyond, and has previously held posts as a Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Venice, and the University of Bologna, as well as a Simon Fellowship in 1995-6 at the University of Manchester. He is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Bergamo.

• BSc Accounting and Finance
  • Decision Making and Control
  • Business Law
  • Extended Essay Supervision
• MSc International Accounting & Finance
  • Professional Integrity and Reflective Practice
  • Dissertation Supervision

His major research and publication interests are in the historical and conceptual study of accounting, management, strategy and modes of valuing. He focuses in the first instance on (i) developing better conceptualisations of accounting as naming-and-counting ‘statement’ across its 10,000 year history, and (ii) its constitutive status as first form of writing and initiator of the ‘non-glottographic’ naming-and-counting statement form (a form of statement with no verbs, and today manifest in such forms as statistics, charts, tables, graphs, equations, frequency distributions, and forms of money). In the second instance he focuses on the genesis of modern management, strategy and governmentality via accounting, approached as a way of doubly disciplinary thinking and acting developed via learning under written, graded examination and manifested first in business management in the USA.

Both projects extend Foucault’s ‘critical history of thought’ in engaging in forms of ‘bottom-up’ theorizing of human thinking and acting, but making explicit the constitutive roles of accounting and pedagogy in shifting our modes of thinking and acting and modes of veridiction.