Mark L. Wardell

Management accounting and the workplace in the United States and Great Britain

Abstract Use of standard costs, budgets and performance report variances became popular in the United States prior to World War II. Comparable widespread use of these management accounting practices did not occur in Britain until the 1970s, if then. While different economic markets have been cited as the reason for this difference in accounting practices, the influence of industrial relations in the two countries has been largely ignored. In this paper we offer a historical-comparative analysis of different management styles and patterns of labor activism, and their relation to different accounting practices in the two countries. The analysis also has implications for a broadened understanding of the different patterns of workplace controls in Britain and the United States.

Gender and Employment in the Service Sector

Previous research (Steiger and Wardell 1992) assessed post-industrial society and labor process hypotheses using data representing the entire United States paid workforce for 1950, 1970, and 1990. Results indicate a better fit between changes in the skill composition of the workforce as expected by labor process theory than by post-industrial society theory. The present research focuses on the United States service sector from 1950 to 1990 using detailed occupation by industry data. The research questions are whether the knowledge-based work of the services industries encourages 1) an upgraded and 2) a less gender segregated distribution of workers over time. We find that inclusion of women from the latent labor reserve offsets, in some industries severely, an otherwise upward shift in the proportion of service workers occupying higher skilled jobs. Moreover, where women have maintained a numerical majority, such as in professional services, their standing in the skill structure relative to men significantly deteriorated over the forty years