British Cost and Management Accounting Theory and Practice, c.1850-c.1950; Resolved and Unresolved Issues

At the heart of a nation's economic success or failure is the performance of individual businesses, which itself reflects the quality of decisions made by businessmen. To make decisions, businessmen require information, including accounting information. Despite the lack of detailed research into the accounting records of businesses, and how they were used to inform decision making, there has nevertheless grown up a conventional wisdom directed at the inadequacy of costing data for decision making, the non-adoption by business of best practice as espoused in the literature, and the failure of accountants o provide the lead in the construction of costing systems [Pollard, 1965; Solomons, 1952; Yamey, 1962]. Recent archival-based research, however, has begun to unravel important elements of this conventional wisdom, and the purpose of this paper is to sununarize its findings and to examine its implications for a broad-based assessment of the development of cost and management accounting theory and practice. Precise start and end dates have not been fixed for this study, but attention is focused principally on the period c.1850-c.1950.