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While many recent accounting histories focus on large companies or institutions and describe the origins, antecedents, or developments of modern practice, few explore the working world of the common man and the activities needed to survive on farms and in rural areas. This paper describes the life of a nondescript early nineteenth century working man primarily through his personal account book. Joseph E. Bell lived in Lincolnton, North Carolina from 1820-1827 and was at various times a minister, a teacher, a seller of books, a renter, a hauler of cotton, a farmer, an extractor of teeth and perhaps a merchant as well. Bell's account book illuminates a life rarely examined by today's accounting historians. It reveals the range of skills and flexibility that were needed to survive in an era preceding the advent of the modern job or career. The account book clearly shows the nature of accounting in a rural economy that had relatively little hard currency and relied on multiparty barter transactions.

The aim of this paper is to explore the role played by cost accounting in Italy’s Industrial Mobilization system and in the largest firm manufacturing weaponry, Ansaldo of Genoa, during WWI. While in other countries such as the UK and the USA, efficiency in buying and managing war material was an important part of military strategy, in Italy, various factors impeded it. This paper focuses on contracting procedures adopted by the Ministry of War and Ministry of Munitions and looks at the cost accounting practices in Ansaldo to see how costs were determined and how prices were set. We found a paradox. On the one hand, despite knowledge of costing, the government did not impose cost controls on the producers of war material, nor on their profit rates. On the other hand, examining Ansaldo’s cost sheets we discover they underestimated their production costs leading the firm to losses despite its favorable political position. This paper contributes to the theoretical debate about the relationships between accounting and war in the Italian context where lobbying, collusion, bribery and private interests dominated the administrative behavior of public and private actors instead of efficiency, accountability and honesty

How best to provide management with useful information about the underutilization of factory and machinery are old cost accounting questions. The literature from the turn of the century up through the 1950s reveals that the topic interested many. This paper resurrects those historical discussions. The objective is twofold, to demonstrate the sophistication and innovation of early writers emphasizing why they thought the topic important, and, to explore some theories about why this interest dissipated within the accounting literature. The possibilities include the effect of the great depression, wartime regulations, the withdrawal of the industrial engineer from costing and the growing importance of income measurement. This research ends in the 1960s, by which time idle capacity as an independent topic has largely disappeared.

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