Accounting, publicity and class conflict in Victorian Britain

John Richard Edwards

Accounting and Business Research, 2022, vol. 52, issue 3, 321-346

Abstract: This paper studies the role of publicly available accounting information in class conflict between capital and labour in Victorian Britain. The company investigated – the Staveley Coal & Iron Company Ltd – is one of the earliest industrial enterprises registered under the Companies Act 1862. The period studied is 1863, when the company was incorporated, through to 1900 by which time the workforce comprised approximately 6400 colliery and iron workers. The history of the company is contextualised in two ways. First, by positioning it within the coal and iron industry in terms of market share, size and profitability. Second, by locating Staveley’s labour management policies within relevant contemporary economic theory. It is then revealed, through an in-depth study of the company’s archives, that the directors sought to manage and manipulate the workforce through the provision of welfare facilities and by denying worker access to accounting information relevant for wage bargaining purposes. The study also unveils the directors’ report as an instrument deployed to project the image of a caring employer and to explain, to its shareholders, the sound business sense of committing resources for that purpose.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00014788.2021.1902260 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:acctbr:v:52:y:2022:i:3:p:321-346

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RABR20

DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2021.1902260

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting and Business Research is currently edited by Vivien Beattie

More articles in Accounting and Business Research from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().