Accounting's representation of industrial expansion and decline: Some evidence from practice at Vickers Shipbuilding, 1910–24

This paper puts forward an exploratory methodology for measuring the yearly representational effects of accounting, as the difference between the constructed profit measure and its underlying transactional base, in response to a call from the World Congress of Accounting Historians for research on differences in the way accounting represents organisational success across periods of industrial expansion and decline. The suggested approach has then been applied to data drawn from the archives of one of Britain's most important shipbuilders, Vickers at Barrow, across a period of unprecedented change in the industry, providing a basis for discussion of the observable representational effects.