This article describes the relationship between the understanding and practice of standard costing in both the U.S. and the U.K. and discusses the development of specific practices in the immediate post-World War II period. Based on a detailed review of the post-war literature, the authors...

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...

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...

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 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...