The military origins of the French management accounting model: a return to the mechanisms of accounting change

Abstract

In 1927, the French employers' organisation, CÈgos, named Lieutenant-Colonel Rimailho as head of a committee charged with the design of a uniform-costing method for all industry sectors. This method (known as the homogeneous sections method) became widely diffused through education channels and its encouragement in the successive French Accounting Plan. Rimailho's testimony and investigations carried out in various military archives show that this system was directly inspired by the experiments undertaken within the military manufacturing plants since the beginning of the twentieth century. This filiation confirms the importance of the role of military engineers in management history. Moreover, this study also reveals two significant aspects of the mechanisms of accounting innovation. First, a certain logic for justifying and legitimising might explain, beside technical and economic determinism, the search for new accounting systems. Second, to be improved and more widely used, a management tool needs a strong support network.

Idéologies et comptabilité

“…Né en 1864, Émile Rimailho décéda en 1954, au terme d'une longue carrière de technicien et de gestionnaire novateur [Lemarchand, 1998]. C'est de son expérience dans les ateliers de l'artillerie que ce polytechnicien tira les conceptions qu'il mit en oeuvre dans l'industrie privée [Lemarchand, 2002]. S'inspirant des méthodes utilisées dans la fabrication du fusil Lebel (1886), où l'on définit et appliqua, pour la première fois en France, semble-t-il, le principe d'interchangeabilité des pièces, qui autorisait le passage à la production en série, il revendiquait une organisation à la française 14 , antérieure à l'importation des idées de Taylor.…”

A Comparison Between Japanese and French Cost Management – Contingency and Institutional Perspectives

“…A homogeneous section is a cost center organized around a main activity to enable the allocation of its costs to products or to other sections. This notion was applied to the French military industries during the 1920's thanks to Lieutenant-Colonel Rimailho (Lemarchand, 2002), who was head of the "Commission Générale d'Organisation Scientifique du Travail" (CGOST). Drawing on his military experience, Rimailho developed the homogeneous sections mechanism in such a way that, according to Lemarchand (Rimailho, 1928: 66;quoted in Lemarchand 2002) "…different specialized activities which make up the section are, in principle, employed in the same proportions for each task undertaken in the section".…”

The History of Management Accounting in France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain

“…However, growing interest has resulted in relevant findings that have been published in well-regarded journals, both in France and internationally. In general, French accounting historians like Lemarchand (1993Lemarchand ( , 1994Lemarchand ( , 2002, Nikitin (1990), and Berland (1998aBerland ( , 2001) have focused on practices spanning the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and on the contributions of authorities who influenced the deployment of cost accounting practices in organizations. Lemarchand and Nikitin (2000) maintain that France played an important role in disseminating accounting practices and theoretical ideas across European countries.…”

“…A homogeneous section is a cost centre organized around a main activity to enable the allocation of its costs to products or to other sections. This notion is strongly linked to Lieutenant-Colonel Rimailho (Bouquin, 1995;Lemarchand 1999Lemarchand , 2002, who in 1927 was appointed head of the Commission Generale d'Organisation Scientifique du Travail (CGOST, later renamed Cégos). In that capacity, Rimailho realized that the calculation of full costs by allocating indirect costs via a single overhead rate was considered less and less satisfactory (Lemarchand, 2002).…”