ACCOUNTING

Accounting

Accounting

History

Our article is based on an analysis of the discourses promoting budgetary control in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, based on two corpuses of texts. It concentrate on the ideas that surrounded declarations made about budgetary control, putting it into perspective in relation to economic and social problems at a national level, or considering it in relation to moral imperatives for the transformation of society. These discussions provide an insight into the ideological environment of the promoters of budgetary control. From the late 1920s to the 1960s a group of accounting techniques developed in France, based on a complex of practices rooted in scientific financial. Budgetary control is one of its tools, and developed alongside standard costing. ''Budgetary control” presupposes: (Thomas 2007)

It shall see that the meaning attributed to budgetary control changes through the period studied. Our work focuses on programmatic aspirations conferred on budgetary control that is on financial discourses and not on financial practices as deployed within firms. However, particularly when a rhetoric accompanies the spread of a new financial technique, it suggest that the study of discourses provides some information on changes in practices. The first part of this article is devoted to a presentation of our framework, together with a brief explanation of our working method. The second part will show how discussions of budgetary control were involved in the debate on social issues in the 1930s and 1950s, and how the idea of budgetary control changed between the two periods, in keeping with changes in this debate. The third part then further explores the productiveness of the theoretical framework put forward in The New Spirit of Capitalism, in order to understand the evolution of business organisations between 1929 and 1960, as seen through the history of budgetary control. While the second section contains a point-by-point comparison of the ideas put forward by the reformers and the budgetary control promoters, the third section aims to describe the dynamics of the change in the representations. It shall see that the meaning attributed to budgetary control changes through the period studied. Our work focuses on programmatic aspirations conferred on budgetary control, that is on financial discourses and not on financial practices as deployed within firms. (Solomon 2002 158)

Difference between Environmental Reporting & Social Reporting

The production of reports comparing the forecasts with what actually happened. Although standard costing can be a help in preparing forecasts - and is often discussed in the same writings as budgetary control, and attributed the same kind of sociopolitical advantages - both techniques developed in a loosely coupled relationship. The progress in France of these two innovations, which ''render visible the inefficiencies” differed: while budgetary control drifted fairly rapidly from discourse to practice, the drift was slower for standard costing.1 The reason for going into no further detail regarding the characteristics of budgetary control, is because its history is also the history of the debates over the ''right way” to use it, which are themselves indissociable from the various ''functions” ...