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Cost Accounting: An Institutional Yardstick For Measuring British Entrepreneural Performance, Circa 1914, Robert R. Locke

Accounting Historians Journal

This article, like that published in the spring issue, again finds fault with recent attempts by economic historians to rehabilitate the reputation of the late Victorian and Edwardian entrepreneur. It argues that, since after 1880 cost accounting became a "necessary" technology for good entrepreneurial performance, the revisionist economic historians' failure to consider institutional factors, like cost accounting, has led them to overlook elements essential to an appraisal of comparative entrepreneurial performance. The growing inferiority of British costing methods, as opposed to American and German, moreover, meant a relative British entrepreneurial failure.