Workshop on cost accounting in Europe: past traditions and current trends.

The article presents information on the Workshop on Cost Accounting in Europe: Past Traditions and Current Trends, organized by EIASM, and held in Brussels, Belgium on December 3 to 4, 1992. The forty-five participants of the workshop, celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of the Institute, came mostly from the European countries, although the U.S. and Canada were also represented. Cost accounting became one of the most significant accounting research topics during the 1980s. This is in sharp contrast to the previous decades, where textbook cost accounting theory was regarded as unproblematic and, accordingly, practically no one did research into cost accounting. In the 1980s everything began to change very rapidly. The origins of the new line of cost accounting research were in the U.S., where a number of researchers became worried about the competitive power of the U.S. manufacturing firms, which were more and more challenged by their highly competitive rivals from Japan.