Is management accounting just what management accountants do? Implicit cost analysis on Britain's railways c.1923-1939

This paper explores how railway companies performed the management accounting function during the first part of the twentieth century. It will be argued that only by understanding the relationship between management techniques and the business process can any judgement as to the quality of management decisions be reached. Through the medium of educational material, the development of train control and railway statistics is explored. It is argued that implicit marginal costing was obtained from non-financial information outside the realm of accounting. This was due to the specific conditions and complexity of operations faced by railway managers. This is then contrasted with the limited, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempts by accountants at the Railway Clearing House to cost services.Management Accounting, Cost Analysis, British Railways, Inter-war Period,

Structural breaks in Austrian foreign trade with Eastern Europe during the early 1970s

Economic history, Structural break, Cointegration, Export subsidies, CMEA trade, F14, C22, N74,

A theory of European accounting development applied to accounting change in contemporary Poland

The paper presents a theory for understanding the diversity of European accounting in market economies by reference to socio-economic factors within an historical context. The theory is developed with reference to two ideal types, based upon the experiences of Britain and Germany. The theory is then used to illuminate the process of accounting transformation in the transitional Polish economy. As a result of the application of the theory in this national context, the paper concludes that accounting policy makers in Central and Eastern Europe will be constrained in their choices of appropriate accounting principles, policies and institutions from the diversity of models available in the market economies of Western Europe. The inference from this conclusion is that the frequently expressed fears concerning the adoption of inappropriate accounting models by emerging market economies may have been exaggerated.

Networks of power and networks of capital: evidence from a peripheral area of the first globalisation. The energy sector in Naples: from gas to electricity (1862–1919)

At the moment of Italian political unification, the Mezzogiorno (i.e. Southern Italy) was affected by a deep institutional change and it entered the wave of financial market openness, attracting all forms of investments from international capital markets. Naples – after having lost its previous role as the Bourbon kingdom’s capital city – enabled projects of large scale urban planning, beginning with basic public utilities. In this process, public and private lighting was chronologically the first area of interest – parallel with railway development planning – where international finance played a role. As evidence of the dynamics which brought this peripheral European area into the orbit of the first globalisation, this article addresses the complex business of energy supply in Naples – between 1862 and World War I – both from the point of view of its financial dynamics and the parallel evolution and organisational characteristics of the business actors involved. The Social Network Analysis (SNA) will support the reconstruction of the diversified and transnational businesses which the Neapolitan energy business was integrated in, at the same time giving evidence of both the bindings linking legally independent companies and the multiple relations between the actors involved. The transition from gas to electricity during this time marked the transition from weak to strong corporate ties according to the evolutionary trends both of technology and international financial markets