ABSTRACT
This chapter relates the labour process theory history of management accounting articulated by Hopper and Armstrong (1991) and extends the analysis to more recent times. Its antecedents lay in a reaction to the triumphalist history of management accounting portrayed in Johnson and Kaplan's 1987 book, Relevance Lost. This castigated prevailing cost accounting practice and paved the way for Kaplan and associated consultants to propagate allegedly new cost accounting techniques such as activity-based costing (ABC). Cost accounting and financial accountants were cast as the villains and cause of US manufacturing woes in the face of Asian, especially Japanese, competition. However, despite widespread practitioner interest, Relevance Lost was essentially an historical account, based loosely on market and transaction cost theorizations, of how cost accounting developed (and allegedly stagnated) during the previous hundred years.
