Twentieth-century textbook budgetary discourse: formalization, normalization and rebuttal in an Anglo-Saxon environment

Abstract

The 1930s and 1940s witnessed a burgeoning in the development of the management and accounting textbook literature on budgeting in corporations. This study examines this period's text writers' efforts to define the dimensions and purposes of budgeting, and their expositions of its advantages, limitations and implementation approaches. Comparison of the style and scope of their articulations with those of text writers in the final decade of the century, reveal both unique and recurring features of their discourse. A Habermasian-based reflection on these historical observations identifies the text as a mutable but potentially active budgetary system steering medium that has exhibited both rebuttal and colonizing tendencies.