In a series of related articles, several authors argue that the establishment of military superintendency at the US Armories in 1841 enabled Daniel Tyler′s “pathbreaking inspection” in 1832 to exert disciplinary power over labour and stimulate subsequent productivity improvements. In...

Accounting historians continue to debate the development of cost accounting procedures in late nineteenth‐century US mass‐production industries. While conventional historians (economic rationalists) emphasize efficiency and co‐ordination, labour process and other “critical” scholars...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on the labour contract system (LCS) established by the Freedmen’s Bureau after the American Civil War to normalise relations between freed-slaves and their former masters and to uphold their rights as free citizens. In particular, it explains the...

In their study of the shipbuilding, engineering and metals industries of the West of Scotland, c. 1900-1960, Fleming et al. (2000: p. 196) concluded that 'standard costing and budgetary control hardly made any impact at all in the engineering-related industries of the West of Scotland and that...

Both the US and UK governments attempted desperate measures during World War I in an effort to maintain wartime production levels of necessary commodities and to allow for their economical purchase by the military. Loft (1986a, 1986b, 1990) has studied the British experience in depth, concluding...

Traditional, single time-period models of quality cost expenditures assume static conditions and ignore the impact of the learning curve effect on a firmÕs product quality, and that of quality improvement efforts by the competitors. In this paper we incorporate both factors in a dynamic model...

In a recent critique of early US cost accounting practice, Hoskin and Macve (1996) conclude that Lawrence Manufacturing Company's 1848 cost accounting reports were purely mercantile and provided no managerial utility. Despite finding mathematically exact allocations and unit costs for different...

The passage in June 1933 of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) heralded an opportunity for the cost-accounting branch of the profession in the US to play a prominent role in the endeavour to revitalize the national economy. This early New Deal legislation sought to end unfair and...