ahjpub.rtf 10/11/00 11:49 published version s/t biblio and RKF final edit Accounting Historians Journal Vol. 27, No. 1 June 2000 pp. 91-149 Keith W. Hoskin WARWICK BUSINESS SCHOOL and Richard H. Macve LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS KNOWING MORE AS KNOWING LESS? ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES OF COST AND MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING IN THE U.S. AND THE U.K. Abstract: In attempting to understand the genesis and scope of modern cost and management accounting systems, accounting historians adopting what has been labeled a “Foucauldian” approach have been rewriting the history of key 18th and 19th century developments in the U.K. and U.S. through new evidence, new interpretation, and a refocusing of attention on familiar events. This is a “disciplinary” history which sees modern cost and management accounting as articulating a new kind of "expert disciplinary knowledge", as well as exercising a “disciplinary power”, in the construction of a new human accountability. However, this “disciplinary” view has been challenged by more “economic rationalist” historians, e.g. Boyns and Edwards [1996] for the British Industrial Revolution and Tyson [1998] for the U.S., as being too narrowly concerned with labor control. This paper takes up the gauntlet. It addresses the theoretical issues and seeks to clarify the import of the “disciplinary view” and its contribution to understanding how 19th century accounting practices shaped emerging managerial discourses, initially in the U.S. It argues that, until businesses adopted this new disciplinarity, there remained an absence of practices focused on calculating human performance, and accounting was not fully deployed to construct that system of “administrative coordination” (Chandler, 1977) which distinguishes modern management action and control. INTRODUCTION We are always rewriting the past, whether through new evidence, new interpretation, or a new focus on old overlooked events. Revisionism constitutes something newly read into some particular aspect of the past—a discovery of new evidence, a discerning of new patterns, a dislodging of old and cherished verities. But what is the knowledge gain? In the flux of such rewriting, and in the contest of ideas it necessarily entails, the quality of the new evidence and the plausibility of the supposed patterns discerned cannot but be questioned. Knowing more may Acknowledgments : The authors express gratitude to the ESRC (grant no. 0023 2405) and the Centre for Business Performance of the ICAEW, without whose funding support much of the archival research underlying this paper could not have been undertaken. They are also grateful to the participants in the 11th Accounting, Business and Financial History Conference, Cardiff, September 15-16, 1999, for their constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper.