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Tsunamis, droughts, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods are a constant threat to society. Where in the past the population at risk had to react on the consequences of disasters, at present society wants to be more in control. Due to the high costs of restoration, of the stress and of the loss of family and friends, a proactive policy in order to prevent disasters or at least to minimize the impact is required. Such a policy asks for a framework to decide on the risk society wants to take. Moreover, it is mandatory to agree on the way instruments preventing disasters are evaluated on their effectiveness. This special issue accounts for the contributions on the methodology of damage estimation by leading European and American economists. Introduces the subject and presents an overview of all papers.

Input‐output analysis (I‐O) is increasingly used in studies of sudden catastrophes such as earthquakes, hurricanes, or, in the case of The Netherlands, major flooding. Unfortunately, in catastrophe analysis, there is no general consensus over the points of departure. Therefore, we need a basic notion of “where to start from”. One task the I‐O modeller faces after the disaster is to construct a plausible basis for the recovery and reconstruction efforts. Here the literature has developed the concept of the so‐called event matrix. The event matrix is an I‐O compatible matrix that traces the development of the situation at selected intervals after the catastrophe and during the reconstruction phase. However, the concept of I‐O on the basis of a well‐founded “event matrix” theory is still developing. It is the purpose of this paper to put forward a specific point of departure in disaster analysis, starting from I‐O fundamentals and introducing the concept of a “basic equation” as a necessary first step in the construction of an event matrix.

This paper examines how a public sector organization combined management control systems (MCS) to comply with increased uncertainty and conflicting objectives of tight budget control, flexibility, and quality care simultaneously. It also analyzes how middle managers interpret management control intentions and manage conflicting objectives, and how locally developed MCS are coupled with top management goals.

This paper uses a case-study approach, based on interviews with top and middle managements, as well as document studies conducted at a medium-sized Danish municipality.

Both constraining and enabling control systems empower middle managers and facilitate tight budget controls. Furthermore, middle managers play a crucial role in the use of MCS, develop local control systems, adjust existing control systems and influence the decisions and strategies of top management.

This paper is context-specific, and the role of accounting in professional work varies due to the specific techniques involved.

This paper shows how MCS, including budgeting and planning systems, can be applied in social services to help middle managements obtain tight budget controls while also improving service quality.

This paper adds to the limited extant research on the role of middle management in a control framework and demonstrates how MCS can balance conflicting goals in social services when uncertainty increases. Furthermore, this paper shows how the vertical coupling of MCS is tight when budgeting is employed for planning purposes.

Advanced usage of web analytics tools allows to capture the content of user queries. Despite their relevant nature, the manual analysis of large volumes of user queries is problematic. The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of named entity recognition in digital library user queries.

The paper presents a large-scale case study conducted at the Royal Library of Belgium in its online historical newspapers platform BelgicaPress. The object of the study is a data set of 83,854 queries resulting from 29,812 visits over a 12-month period. By making use of information extraction methods, knowledge bases (KBs) and various authority files, this paper presents the possibilities and limits to identify what percentage of end users are looking for person and place names.

Based on a quantitative assessment, the method can successfully identify the majority of person and place names from user queries. Due to the specific character of user queries and the nature of the KBs used, a limited amount of queries remained too ambiguous to be treated in an automated manner.

This paper demonstrates in an empirical manner how user queries can be extracted from a web analytics tool and how named entities can then be mapped with KBs and authority files, in order to facilitate automated analysis of their content. Methods and tools used are generalisable and can be reused by other collection holders.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

This paper aims to explore how the introduction of new accounting information influences the understandings of cost-consciousness. Furthermore, the paper explores how managers use accounting information to shape organizational members’ understanding of changes, and how focusing on cost-consciousness influence professional culture within social services.

The paper is based on a case study, drawing on sensemaking as a theoretical lens. Top management, middle management and staff specialists at a medium-sized Danish municipality are interviewed.

The paper demonstrates how accounting metaphors can be effective in linking cost information and cost-consciousness to operational decisions in daily work practices. Further, the study elucidates how professionalism may be strengthened based on the use of accounting information.

The study is context specific, and the role of accounting in professional work varies on the basis of the specific techniques involved.

The paper shows how managers influence how professionals interpret and use accounting information. It shows how cost-consciousness can be integrated with social work practices to improve service quality.

The paper contributes to the literature on how accounting information influences social work. To date, only a few papers have focused on how cost-consciousness can be understood in practice and how it influences professional culture. Further, the study expands the limited accounting metaphor research.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The need to change budgeting has been frequently debated. Drawing on the literature on management accounting and budgeting change, this study aims to explore changes in budgeting and whether experienced success of budgeting varied with time and budget type. Changes in the use of the following budget types were investigated: fixed, revised, rolling, flexible and hybrid budgets.

This study uses a mixed research methodology. Survey data was collected from the same business units of large Finnish manufacturing firms in 2004 (Time 1) and 2016/2017 (Time 2) (N = 28). In addition, some of the respondents of the latter survey were interviewed in 2023 (Time 3).

Almost all business units were found to have remained loyal to budgeting. However, changes in budget types were not uncommon and varied considerably. Overall, the use of fixed budgets continued strongly, the use of revised and hybrid budgets declined, and the use of rolling budgets increased over time. Moreover, the joint use of budgets declined. The perceived success of budgetary processes was, initially, weakened by the use of fixed budgets and, later, by the use of revised budgets. The interview data further illustrates some of the patterns of, and reasons behind, the changes.

Longitudinal analysis of change in the same business units was useful in revealing the patterns of change in budgeting and on relationships between the variables analysed over time. Further research could be carried out using more extensive case studies in companies or sector-focused surveys longitudinally.

The purpose of this study is to introduce new tools to develop a more precise and focused bibliometric analysis on the field of digitalization in healthcare management. Furthermore, this study aims to provide an overview of the existing resources in healthcare management and education and other developing interdisciplinary fields.

This work uses bibliometric analysis to conduct a comprehensive review to map the use of the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) research models in healthcare academic studies. Bibliometric studies are considered an important tool to evaluate research studies and to gain a comprehensive view of the state of the art.

Although UTAUT dates to 2003, our bibliometric analysis reveals that only since 2016 has the model, together with UTAUT2 (2012), had relevant application in the literature. Nonetheless, studies have shown that UTAUT and UTAUT2 are particularly suitable for understanding the reasons that underlie the adoption and non-adoption choices of eHealth services. Further, this study highlights the lack of a multidisciplinary approach in the implementation of eHealth services. Equally significant is the fact that many studies have focused on the acceptance and the adoption of eHealth services by end users, whereas very few have focused on the level of acceptance of healthcare professionals.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a bibliometric analysis of technology acceptance and adoption by using advanced tools that were conceived specifically for this purpose. In addition, the examination was not limited to a certain era and aimed to give a worldwide overview of eHealth service acceptance and adoption.