The growth of industrial activity in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries created a demandfor a new type of accounting, viz. "industrial accounting
", to satisfy the changing internal information requirements of business
owners/managers. Recent research into the accounting records of a number of iron
companies covering this period has suggested that, despite the paucity of the
contemporary British literature on industrial accounting, new accounting techniques
and new ideas concerning the potentialities of accounting were developed. Building
on these advances, this paper employs the notion of "change agents" to explore the
mechanism through which new techniques and ideas were disseminated within the basic
metal mining and smelting industries of Wales. Within this context, particular
attention is given to the type of person responsible for carrying out the internal
accounting function.
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