Cost engineering and costing in Hawthorn Leslie Shipbuilders, 1886–1915

This research examines cost engineering and costing in a British shipbuilding firm in the late nineteenth – early twentieth century. The firm maintained separate systems of contract accounting, costing and reporting for directors and employed internal data from these systems in performance measurement, the development of managerial incentives and the enforcement of managerial accountability. An apparent gap in the information required to manage the firm in a cyclical and highly competitive industry during a period of rapid organisational and technological change was filled by an informal and personal cost engineering system developed by the shipbuilding manager. The shipbuilding manager's cost engineering system employed a wide range of both internal and external data for use in cost management and in cost estimation, pricing and tendering. Thus cost engineering and costing developed to serve different purposes and developed in different spheres and along different trajectories.