From Costing to Cost Management: How Cost Management Became a Strategic Imperative

Abstract

This chapter provides a historical narrative of how cost accounting and management practices evolved in a dialectical relationship with the evolution of capitalism in the West, which is the point of departure and geo-political comparison area for the research. This chapter highlights early practices of cost accounting and internal contracting in the pre-capitalist phase. It then moves gradually to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when micro-level practices of budgeting, cost standards and family management at the level of the organisation were located in the macro regime of industrial capitalism. The chapter concludes with an examination of the strategic management and cost management practices that emerged alongside post-industrial capitalism.