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The purpose of this paper is to study the incidence, impact, and consequences of accountant and lawyer bankruptcies in Victorian Scotland. The paper examines these bankruptcies in the context of an emerging profession separating from an established legal profession as part of the rise of professionalism in the Victorian Age.

The paper reports data describing 135 accountant and 361 lawyer bankruptcies declared between 1855 and 1904. It uses theories of the rise of professionalism, signals of movement to occupational ascendancy, and social attitudes to money to provide explanations of the incidence, impact, and consequences of these bankruptcies. The paper also examines bankruptcy and the early disciplinary codes of professional accountancy associations.

Despite a trend of general decline in total, accountant, and lawyer bankruptcies in Scotland through the Victorian Age, there is no consistency over time between accountant and lawyer bankruptcies and economic conditions. Bankrupt accountants were typically unregulated as professionals in contrast with bankrupt lawyers who were usually regulated. Accountant and lawyer bankruptcies predominantly involved experienced practitioners, location in major cities, and administration by professional accountants. Bankruptcy was associated with criminal activity in a minority of cases in each profession. There was inconsistency in the post‐bankruptcy disciplining of bankrupt accountants and lawyers, and post‐bankruptcy loss of economic status in both professions.

The paper contributes to the Victorian history of institutionalised professions such as accounting and law. It demonstrates the presence of marginal practitioners in emerging and established professions, the need to study professionalisation in social context, and the impact of bankruptcy on discipline in an emerging profession.

The paper represents the first contextualised study of bankruptcy among professionals generally and accountants and lawyers, particularly in the Victorian Age.

This paper aims to examine the effect of circular economy’s ending of waste on marginal property practices.

This paper utilises doctrinal and theoretical legal analysis, along with theoretical perspectives and qualitative empirical evidence drawn from non-legal academic disciplines.

The current legalistic conception of waste depends on control and value. The indeterminate status of waste as goods at the margins of consumption attracts attention from legal regimes. This process is evidenced by a commercialised treatment of goods at the margins of consumption, limiting the scope of radical marginal property practices such as freeganism (taking goods abandoned by others, to use such goods).

The circular economy aims to end waste. Restriction, and ultimately elimination, of marginal property practices is necessary for circular economy. Freegans will be limited to acting in a “challenge” role, identifying breaches of commercial commodification processes. Control over the use (including disposal) of goods reduces the spaces available for marginal property practices, which in turn raises problematic normative implications for “normal” consumption practices involving waste.

This is the first examination of the impact of circular economy on freeganism. It is also the first sustained application of marginal property theory (van der Walt, 2009) in a legal analysis of circular economy and waste.

Numerous studies have examined the institutional setting of accounting as a professional occupation. However, institutional deeds and outcomes derive from the behaviour of individual actors, particularly those key players who drive the creation, policy development and outlook of practitioner associations. Recognising this, and in search of a more detailed understanding of the dynamics of professional formation, this study applies the prosopographical method of inquiry to accounting development in Australia during the period 1886 to 1908. Motives and actions are identified with the founding members of the Incorporated Institute of Accountants, Victoria, during this formative era, which saw key personalities transfer their allegiance to the Australasian Corporation of Public Accountants. The beliefs, preferences and ambitions of individual participants are shown to exert significant influence over the process of professional formation, highlighting the capacity of prosopographical studies to augment the predominantly vocational and institutional focus of the prior sociology of professions literature.

Surveys the process of professionalization as it applies to UK librarianship in its evolution from occupation through semi‐profession to full blown professional status. Examines Abbott’s ideas on the heartland of work and jurisdiction in relation to librarianship and some of the issues bearing on the profession today, such as deprofessionalization and hospitality of membership. Gives an historical overview of the first events in the passage of the Library Association along the professionalization continuum. Outlines a model of a fusion‐fission process underlying the life cycle of professional bodies.

The purpose of this Australian case study, set in the 1960s, is to comprehensively examine the responses of the two major professional accounting bodies to a financial/corporate/regulatory crisis necessitating the defence of the profession's legitimacy.

This historical paper draws on surviving primary records and secondary sources and applies the perspectives on the dynamics of occupational groups and the legitimacy typology of Suchman.

While the history of the accounting profession has been characterized by intra‐professional rivalries, this case study illustrates how such rivalries were put aside on recognising the power of collectivizing in defending the profession's legitimacy. Based on the available evidence, pragmatic legitimacy is shown to have been a key focus of attention by the major accounting bodies involved.

The paper may motivate similar studies in Australia and elsewhere, thus potentially contributing to developing a literature on comparative international accounting history. The evidence for this historical investigation is largely restricted to surviving documents, making it necessary to rely on assessments of the key sources.

In addressing responses to crises in defending the legitimacy of the profession as a whole, the paper makes an original contribution in exploring the relationship between literature on the dynamics of occupational groups and on legitimacy management.

This article describes efforts to develop a joint health and social services strategy for rehabilitation in one local authority area in response to national policy. It notes the effects of competing policy initiatives, of the shift in hospital provision to providing only acute care, and of failure to agree joint responsibility for the future development of such services.

Most of the thousands of studies of leadership as well as strategic leadership in organizations choose as the unit of analysis the individual leader. This choice runs contrary to the often-observed fact that organizations have numerous leaders at all levels of the organization – in other words, a network of leaders, which permeates the formal organizational structure. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize strategic leadership by advancing understanding of: the effects of variations in internal complexity and external turbulence and the effects of choices by the strategic leadership based on those variations.

The paper advocates a network approach to strategic leadership where there is a set of highly dynamic role changes, based on both human and social capital. The typology and propositions in the paper emerged over a period of many years of observation of organizations (direct and indirect) as well as reflection of theories on how strategic leadership actually occurs in medium to large-size profit-oriented organizations.

The paper proposes a model of strategic leadership based upon four modes of single actor and shared leadership (stars, clans, teams, and leadership networks). The paper sets forth propositions for the situational appropriateness of each of these four forms and identifies avenues for future research to advance the theory.

The paper cross-fertilizes extant research streams in leadership and strategic management to create a contingency theory of strategic leadership that is closer to what executives actually experience in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategies and dynamics of the fledging accounting professional project in the context of boom, bust and reform in colonial Victoria. In doing so, the study provides evidence of the association of members of the Incorporated Institute of Accountants, Victoria (IIAV) (1886) and other auditors with banks that failed during the early 1890s Australian banking crisis, and addresses the implications for the professionalisation trajectory.

The study uses primary sources, including the surviving audited financial statements of a selection of 14 Melbourne-based failed banks, reports of relevant company meetings and other press reports and commentaries, along with relevant secondary sources, and applies theoretical analysis informed by the literature on the sociology of the professions.

IIAV members as bank auditors are shown to have been associated with most of the bank failures examined in this study, thereby not being immune from key problems in bank auditing and accounting of the period. The study shows how the IIAV, while part of the problem, ultimately became part of a solution that was regarded within the association’s leadership as less than optimal, essentially by means of 1896 legislative reforms in Victoria, and also addresses the associated implications.

The study reveals how a deeper understanding of economic and social problems in any context may be obtainable by examining surviving financial statements and related records sourced from archives of surviving business records.

The study elucidates accounting’s professionalisation trajectory in a colonial setting during respective periods of boom, bust and reform from the 1880s until around 1896 and provides insights into the development of financial auditing practices, which is still an important topic.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss incentive mechanisms and procedures for cost internalization by both potential defendants and plaintiffs.

The approach taken is to rely on the concepts of liability, negligence, precaution and methodologies for estimation of compensatory damages in conjunction with the Coase theorem.

The paper finds that the decision to internalize and minimize cost depends upon marginal precautionary costs and marginal expected harms.

Research needs to be conducted from a law and economic perspective on developing procedures for estimating precautionary costs and expected harms.

This paper calls upon business firms and their stakeholders (primarily employees and customers) to use and pro‐actively manage their precautionary responsibilities and further refine the existing formulas. More specifically, it aims to help law and economics students as well as practitioners in law and regulation to better understand the implications of marginal precautionary costs and marginal expected harms in the process of cost internalization.

In exploring the precautionary responsibilities of firms and their stakeholders, this paper contributes to a better understanding of liability and negligence issues and, as a result, to the important intersection of law and microeconomics.

The purpose of this paper is to overcome the challenges of doing research in pluralistic settings by performing multi-event ethnographies. The proposal redirects the efforts of longitudinal data collection toward field-configuring events (FCEs), wherein multiple organizations with divergent perspectives over an issue are strategizing in concentrated efforts, at the same time and space. The authors apply traditional ethnographic tools in this understudied setting. On the one hand, these tools allow for a thick description that results in in-depth accounts of actors within FCEs. On the other hand, they provide flexibility because they can be used in complementary ways.

The authors propose the use of three interconnected ethnographic tools in multiple events: shadowing, practitioner's diary and researcher's reflexive journal.

The illustration of an ongoing research project showed how the approach helped the researchers to follow a practitioner in multiple discursive spaces but also to see how the practitioner, even with a different status in a later FCE, transported a deviant practice that denounces his persistent disadvantaged position in the field. The approach delineated here allowed the researchers to open a new window for the appreciation of the activities of marginal actors fighting against hegemonic discourses.

The application of the shadowing technique might be challenging. Attention might also be paid to the implications of previous FCEs to current dynamics.

The tools developed in this approach have a large potential to have practical implications, as the practitioner accounts of the phenomenon in question are at the center of the data collection and analysis.

The proposal contributes to the literature on organizational ethnography by drawing attention to the importance of tracking multiple events, not only different sites, to unveil organizational practices in pluralistic settings as events progress over time.