More Peculiarities of the British: Budgetary Control in U.S. and UK Business to 1939
Budgetary control is a crucial technique for managing large, integrated enterprises. Often presented as a management accounting technique, it is best considered in a wider role as a method of planning and coordinating activities across functional departments and delegating tasks down a managerial hierarchy without loss of control. In the United States budgetary control evolved together with large integrated enterprise and became systematI2ed and widely used as a management technique following the experience of U.S. business in the post-World War I boom and slump. The various examples of UK practice, or non-practice, in budgetary control demonstrate that, as with other management techniques, there was a small minority of UK firms who adopted sophisticated practices as developed as any in the United States or Germany and a large majority of firms whose management practices barely changed from before World War I to after World War II. It is not correct, therefore, to characterize UK business as universally under-developed in management technique: there was a wide divergence in practice, sometimes within the same firm. There was sufficient publicly available information and there were sufficient trained personnel for any UK company to adopt any current management technique had it wished to do so. The failure to adopt them was a failure of demand not supply. The explanation for this failure — the word failure being used here in a straightforwardly judgmental and normative way — may be found, it is suggest ed, in the particular structures adopted by large UK enterprise. These structures were in turn the consequence of persistent proprietorial power which tended to weaken the development of integrated management structures and, in particular, worked against the development of top management. The adoption of new management techniques by a minority of UK firms only took place when, due to particular circumstances, it suited proprietorial interests to do so.