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Description As we enter the new millennium, some of us may be wondering who really will inherit the earth. Traditionally, the meek have had the inside track. But if we take Michael Power (1999) ser- iously, auditors may be the ones who win out in the end. In the public sector, new models of gov-...

Description The Oka Crises, Gustafsen Lake, Ipperwash. This last decade of visible confrontations between the Canadian army/ police and ®rst nations people have been, and are, about land. Land that the First nations' people claim is rightfully theirs and which the government claims has been...

Description New product development has changed signi®cantly over the last decade and management control systems have played an important role in this transformation. This study draws on Galbraith's concept of uncertainty and investi- gates the relationship between project uncertainty, product...

Description This paper investigates associations between evaluations of activity based costing (ABC) systems, contextual factors, and factors related to the ABC implementation process using interview and survey data from 21 ®eld research sites of two ®rms. Structural equation modeling is used to...

Description Matthews et al.'s The Priesthood of Industry [Matthews, D., Anderson, M., & Edwards, J.R. (1998). The preisthood of industry. The rise of the professional accountant in British management. Oxford: Oxford University Press] charts the encroachment of professional accountants into the...

Description In the contingency literature on the behavioral and organizational e€ects of budgeting, use of the Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA) technique is prevalent. This technique is used to test contingency hypotheses that predict interaction e€ects between budgetary and contextual...

Description Management control systems represent what is believed to be an important element in managing internal and external interdependencies. The case study we present in this paper is an attempt to provide additional information contributing to the understanding of the in¯uences on and the...

Description This study reports the results of a longitudinal ®eld experiment designed to examine the impact of group discussion when soliciting user requirements of an accounting information system. A total of 346 subjects were randomly assigned to individual and group treatment conditions. Pre-...

Description New product development has changed signi®cantly over the last decade and management control systems have played an important role in this transformation. This study draws on Galbraith's concept of uncertainty and investi- gates the relationship between project uncertainty, product...

Description The accounting literature has argued that ®rms overengage in outsourcing because they tend to ignore the transac- tion costs involved in buying services from external suppliers. A ®eld experiment with managers of health care orga- nizations shows that decision makers are actually...

Description Cross-national studies of management control systems and internal accounting practices are suggestive of the exis- tence of distinct national di€erences. These studies are, however, methodologically partial, drawing upon contingency theory rationales and culture based arguments in...

Description This paper is focused on the way in which inter®rm relations can be drawn up and controlled. Drawing on con- tracting theories a model is built of the management control structure of inter®rm relationships. The model consists of three control patterns and of contingency factors that...

Description This paper reports an ethnographic study of the activities of auditors in the ®eld as they work to ful®l an eciency auditing mandate; it analyses how auditors report on eciency in practice. Miller and Rose's work on governmentality (Miller, P., & Rose, N. (1990). Governing economic...

Description It is becoming increasingly recognized that management accounting and management control procedures and sys- tems vary signi®cantly between organizations, sectors and societies. Four characteristics of control systems, in parti- cular, di€er considerably between institutional...

Description Accounting has not escaped The Customer's in¯uence in contemporary organizations. Calls have been made for a quantitative knowledge that installs a new calculable space in the name of The Customer. In an organizational setting, a UK sudsidiary of Unilever, the paper traces ®rst the...

Description Liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991 increased the intensity of international competition and changed the internal information needs of Indian managers. This paper explores the evolution of a broad range of management accounting practices in 14 ®rms using a contingency theory...

Description Past accounting experiments have demonstrated signi®cant e€ects of absorption vs variable costing systems on pri- cing decisions, but in individual settings that suppressed market features. The main ®nding of the current study is that a cost-based pricing bias did not persist in...

Description This study examines cultural factors which may facilitate or impede the sharing of informal information in the con- text of face-to-face meetings in Chinese compared to Anglo-American organizations. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected through personally conducted...

Description This paper reviews cross-cultural research in management control systems (MCS) appearing in English-language journals over the past 15 years. The objectives are to examine these studies for their convergence or otherwise with respect to the state of our understanding of cultural...

Description This paper examines the impact of constituent lobbying activity on accounting regulators during the transformation of the Fourth European Company Law Directive into German accounting law. Using detailed published commentaries prepared by representative organisations on draft...