Product costing practices in different manufacturing industries: a British survey

Shields (1998) has speculated that there will be an increasing divergence in management accounting practices across industries. Research into product costing practice, however, has tended to study product costing practices across industries and has not attempted to compare practices between industries. This paper addresses this deficiency by comparing the product costing practices from a questionnaire completed by 129 management accountants working in different operating units from four manufacturing industries in Great Britain. The results reveal that, in general, there are no significant differences in the product costing practices across the four manufacturing industries. This provides some confirmation of the validity of the results of prior research that does not discriminate between the practices of the various industries included in their samples. However, this paper needs to be replicated to confirm this result.