Erich Schiff, Einführung in die Grundfragen des industriellen Rechnungswesens. Erich Schneider (1942)

Erich Schiff’s review of Erich Schneider’s 1939 book places industrial accounting within a growing exchange between economic theory and business-management theory. Its central judgment is that Schneider brings analytical rigor to accounting by treating individual calculations as elements of coherent systems. Schiff evaluates both the intellectual significance and the pedagogical demands of this approach: the book offers substantial theoretical clarity, but requires prior accounting knowledge and sustained study.

The review begins with a comparative account of disciplinary convergence. In the United States, accounting’s place in economics education and abundant information about business practices had encouraged contact between the two fields. Germany lacked these advantages, yet scholars of business administration developed theoretical approaches to questions already prominent in Anglo-American economics. Schiff singles out their analysis of how production costs depend on capacity utilization. Schneider’s contribution reverses that direction of influence:

Schneider's new book could be called a successful counterinvasion by an economic theorist into the field of business management theory.

The military metaphor describes a productive crossing of disciplinary boundaries. Schiff identifies Schneider with younger German economists who introduced Marshallian partial-equilibrium analysis into German theoretical literature, noting his earlier application of Cambridge analytical tools to monopoly. This background explains the reviewer’s expectations, but Schiff carefully distinguishes the accounting book’s actual scope from a general treatment of industrial economics. Originating in lectures delivered in Aarhus and Copenhagen, it concentrates on the formal organization of accounting and cost computation; neighboring economic questions, including the laws of return, receive limited attention.

Its distinctive achievement is therefore neither a comprehensive economic theory of production nor a practical sequence of bookkeeping instructions. Schiff locates its organizing purpose more precisely:

The author's aim has been to give what might be called a scientific typology of logically possible systems of cost and profit computation.

“Typology” captures the book’s effort to distinguish systems according to their logical structure. Its crucial conceptual move is to make the function of an accounting operation depend on the whole arrangement within which it occurs:

In pursuing this aim he has been particularly careful to show how and why the functional role played by every particular act of computing or allocating costs or profits is dependent on the total system of which the single acts form part.

Schiff illustrates this principle through the book’s distinctions rather than supplying a complete chapter inventory. Cost computation serves different functions in homogeneous mass production and production to order. Calculations based on actual costs are treated separately from those based on planned costs. A special chapter examines alternative ways of coordinating recorded costs with calculations for individual pieces or phases of work. Together, these examples show why superficially similar accounting acts cannot be understood apart from their production setting and computational framework.

The closing assessment links the book’s abstraction to its educational purpose. Schneider seeks thorough theoretical training, deliberately avoiding concrete examples that might make the presentation more colorful. Double-entry bookkeeping is assumed throughout; mathematical notation is frequent, although confined to elementary algebra. Schiff consequently qualifies the accessibility implied by “Introduction”: successful reading demands concentration and patient work. His favorable verdict rests on the clarity gained through that effort. The review’s broader relevance lies in its account of accounting as a systematic analytical discipline, while keeping the book’s formal contribution distinct from the economic problems it only briefly addresses.