Le calcul des coûts en France dans la deuxième révolution industrielle : un éclairage par les méthodes d'équivalence

The history of costing has been the subject of much research since the 19th century. Throughout the past two centuries, we have examples of use of equivalence methods. These however appear to have been somewhat neglected both by the specialist literature and by accounting historians and have never been the subject of a general study. Our work shows how the different costing methods appeared in successive waves, at the crest of which we have equivalence methods, corresponding to the points at which certain businesses felt a need to simplify the over-sophisticated costing methods that they had recently introduced further to theoretical advances. We have defined four periods that mark the progress of costing techniques: 1880-1910, the advent of industrial accounting; 1910-1930: influence of American methods in France; 1930-1950: the development of homogeneous sectors; 1950-1960, the advent of autonomous equivalence methods. We have thus observed a constant fluctuation between the increasing complexity of the methods and the need to simplify them based on the principle of equivalences.