Standard Costs, Standard Costing and the Introduction of Scientific Management and New Technology into the Post-Second World War Sunderland Shipbuilding Industry

Abstract In their study of the shipbuilding, engineering and metals industries of the West of Scotland, c. 1900–1960, Fleming et al. (2000: p. 196) concluded that ‘standard costing and budgetary control hardly made any impact at all in the engineering-related industries of the West of Scotland and that this … was correlated with the non-adoption of Scientific Management’. Fleming et al. encouraged further research to determine if this pattern of adoption was replicated elsewhere during the period. In this manner, the current research focuses on the post-Second World War development of standard costs and standard costing in Sunderland, a shipbuilding town of international importance on the north-east coast of England. Although the availability of company archives is somewhat limited, we nevertheless found evidence that at least one leading shipbuilding firm undertook major modernisation and reorganisation programmes, comprising the adoption of the new technology of welding, during the study period. Allied with these radical changes, the firm employed scientific management methods and utilised standard costs, but it did not employ full systems of standard costing and variance analysis. These costing developments were built into shipbuilders' traditional information systems based on the use of cost and output curves. However, the craft administration of production remained common in many shipbuilding firms and precluded developments in scientific management and standard costing.