 Cost engineering and costing in Hawthorn Leslie Shipbuilders, 1886–1915Tom McLean The British Accounting Review, 2013, vol. 45, issue 4, 284-296 Abstract: This research examines cost engineering and costing in a British shipbuilding firm in the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The firm maintained separate systems of contract accounting, costing and reporting for directors and employed internal data from these systems in performance measurement, the development of managerial incentives and the enforcement of managerial accountability. An apparent gap in the information required to manage the firm in a cyclical and highly competitive industry during a period of rapid organisational and technological change was filled by an informal and personal cost engineering system developed by the shipbuilding manager. The shipbuilding manager's cost engineering system employed a wide range of both internal and external data for use in cost management and in cost estimation, pricing and tendering. Thus cost engineering and costing developed to serve different purposes and developed in different spheres and along different trajectories. Keywords: Contract accounting; Cost accounting; Cost engineering; Costing (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bracre:v:45:y:2013:i:4:p:284-296 DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2013.06.010 Access Statistics for this article The British Accounting Review is currently edited by Nathan Lael Joseph and Alan Lowe More articles in The British Accounting Review from Elsevier |
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