During the first sixty years or so of the twentieth century, a number of accounting techniques were developed for use in the management of business. One of those new techniques was budgetary control. This paper examines the dissemination and diffusion of budgetary control in France and Britain...

Standard costing was developed during the early years of the twentieth century in connection with the rise of scientific management. Such research as has been carried out into the adoption of this technique suggests that European firms lagged well behind their American counterparts in its...

Standard costing was developed during the early years of the twentieth century in connection with the rise of scientific management. Such research as has been carried out into the adoption of this technique suggests that European firms lagged well behind their American counterparts in its...

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a growth in the use of information within firms throughout the industrialised nations. In her survey of this phenomenon in American businesses, Yates (1989, 1994) has stressed the importance not only of technological developments in...

This study examines aspects of the accounting and financial history of the South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) from its formation in 1907. In particular we focus on the 1930s, a period in which the activities of the SMR became increasingly dominated by the demands of the Kwantung Army which...

This article looks at the effects of office mechanisation in greater detail by describing data processing innovations in major building societies during the dawn of the computer era. Reference to similar developments in clearing banks, industrial and computer organisations provides evidence as...

Through a detailed examination, using business archives, of the impact of the First World War on cost calculation practices in British firms, this paper examines, and finds wanting, the claim of Loft (1986, 1990) that cost accounting came into the light in Britain during the First World War.