This paper sets out to examine the development, in Britain and France prior to 1880, of industrial accounting, defined for the purposes of this paper as the practice of cost calculation within an accounting system based on double entry bookkeeping. Similarities and differences between the two...

Hoskin and Macve have suggested that the crucial discontinuity in accounting’s development over the last two centuries occurred with its use for disciplinary purposes at the Springfield Armory in the USA in the 1830s and 1840s. Questions the applicability of their thesis to Britain through an...

1. Introduction : governance and entropy -- 2. The limitations of uncertainty and risk-averse public policy -- 3. Government as uncertainty and risk manager of last resort -- 4. Concepts for facilitating the transition -- 5. Implementing the transition -- 6. Conclusions : low entropy governance.