Historical enquiry reveals how ideas mutate. This account of the ideas underpinning how fair value accounting (FVA) drifted into corporate financial reporting shows that a primary lesson of business history is that we ignore history at our peril, that frequently we encourage the recall of...

The use of accounting to help apply the principles of scientific management to business affairs is associated with the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control. This first British industry-based study of the implementation of these calculative techniques makes use of the case study...