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Since the evolution of theories of organisation in relation to environment the issue of environmental turbulence has come to dominate the literature of management. The strategists in organisations have become the repositories of this turbulence. A policy statement is defined as a statement which absorbs uncertainty, that is, states which are regarded as having a probabilistic formulation may be regarded via an interpretive policy statement as having quasi‐certainty. This protective function of policy permits parts of an organisation to operate in a regular, technically efficient fashion. In this sense all organisation boundaries are policy statements. Within the confines of ordered, stable or quasi‐stable states the disciplines of accounting and operations research may flourish. The accountants in organisations have become the repositories of this order. Accounting is a language of order, an instrument of control which is ordered, narrowly rational and reflects in the organisation that which is similar to the super‐ego. Environmental turbulence threatens chaos and chaos is the antithesis of order. The tension which is experienced in many organisations is exactly the tension between chaos and order, between the threat of being overcome and the need to maintain organisation boundaries. This tension exists in individuals and persons become established in roles which are psychologically comfortable for them (i.e. the accountant is an accountant because he is comfortable with high levels of order and stability). This paper will argue that the use of accountants and accounting as the repository of the problem of order is not accidental and that it is caused by the splitting and projection of parts of whole problems of organisation into variously attuned receptacles. Further, any attempt by accountants to break away from the role of repositories of order will be resisted by other organisational participants mainly because the anxiety associated with a contingent ‘free for all’ is unacceptable.

Following on studies of the reported importance of a range of external advice and a study of the impact of marketing advice on small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) performance, this study seeks to examine the relationship between business performance (growth) and the nature and degree of a wide range of business advice used by a sample of owner/managers of SMEs in the Manchester City‐region of the UK.

The study was conducted with 140 SMEs in the Manchester City region using an administered survey instrument.

The degree of use of a range of external advice was positively related to the growth rate of the SME. In common with most previous research, the most sought‐after advisers were external accountants and network contacts. Academic advice was sought very rarely. This study extends previous research and examine the nature of the advice provided by external accountants, which was found to include business, emergency, and financial management support in addition to statutory advice. The degree of provision of this additional assistance was associated with higher growth.

The relationship of advice and growth has been examined using a survey instrument. Further research is needed to understand how advice is sought, provided and used.

Accountants, network contacts and others were significant providers of advice and, where this advice was used, then SMEs reported higher growth rates. The direction of effect is probably in favour of the value of advice, but there could be virtuous cycles of advice and growth. However, the nature and quality of advice sought, offered, understood and embedded in business practice networks and contributing to social capital require further study.

The research extends previous studies by the range of advice and the nature of advice provided by external accountants, considered in relation to firm performance.

The “risk society” presents a considerable challenge to current understanding of the question of risk and the task of organisational leadership. Beck has proposed that we, in late modernity, are moving from an industrial society to a risk society, which requires a corresponding shift from modernism to reflexive modernism. A brief discussion of the risk compensation ideas of Adams will be used to bridge to some observation about how humans approach and understand risk in our society. Four stances towards risk are used as a basis for considering the modes of leadership associated with each of them. It is argued that this provides a starting point from which leadership theory may be extended from its mainly intra organisation perspective to include critical reflexiveness in an inter‐ and extra‐organisational framing. This goes beyond social responsibility to include a critical attention to how a risk society requires leadership to be construed in institutional terms.

States that two goal orientations may be held by individuals: a performance goal and a learning goal (Ames and Archer, 1988; Dweck and Leggett, 1988). The much‐discussed learning organisation requires individuals either to possess or to develop a learning orientation. Leadership theorists (Bass, 1985; Burns, 1978) have identified characteristics of leadership which may be classified as transactional or transformational. The links between leadership and goal orientation are explored. It was conjectured that transformational leadership would be associated with a learning‐goal orientation and transactional leadership would be associated with a performance‐goal orientation. These propositions are supported by evidence from an empirical study of professional accountants in the UK. The findings suggest that desirable leadership behaviour for a learning organisation is transformational and desirable follower behaviour should include a learning orientation.

To examine control and accountability in an expressive organisation.

The paper was based upon a longitudinal case study of events in the Church of England from 1994 to 2001 and was based on documents, debates in the governing body, conversations and interviews and participants' observation.

As a response to a financial crisis a group of financiers from within the Evangelical theological tradition (which places stress on headship and control) proposed the creation of a new church governance body (a national council) with strongly integrated central control and severely diminished conciliar participation. This group described the complex church organisations and structures (disparagingly) as “a cats cradle of autonomous and semi autonomous organizations”. This conflicted with the values of the other covenant traditions (Anglo‐Catholic and Liberal). The new body was created, but the proposed centralised control was unraveled, the existing constitution and governance was maintained, the “cats cradle” was enriched within the ground metaphor of autonomy. The case shows how the loosely coupled nature of this expressive institution with its multiple theological (value and belief) stances and multiple organisations, relationships and accountabilities was almost impervious to the attempt to shift them into an ordered and controlled hierarchy.

The great complexity of an ancient Church constrains the researcher to a limited account.

Change in expressive organisations happens by emergent negotiation and cannot be directed because the various value positions infuse everything.

The conception of control and accountability as being constructed and reconstructed in the interplay of the constructs of covenant, constitution and contract. This theorising may have a wider application both to expressive, public institutions and private organisations.

The education of future business leaders is centred in the many MBA programmes in the world. Most of these are based on the idea of managers acting as agents of capital whose task is then to be the agents of economic efficiency. This idea, taken from liberal market theory, is limited to a particular ideological stance. Provides a critique of that and other ideological stances from Christian conceptions of love and freedom, ethical and ecological grounds and argues that neither liberal market capitalism nor state centralism is acceptable. Argues that a changing understanding of both social and physical eco‐systems leads to a need to open up leadership education to a wider array of ideologies, including social democracy, democratic socialism and ecological conservationism. Otherwise the next generation of leaders will be less able to cope with the wider array of values in the global economy and unable to acknowledge their role of citizens as of equal importance with their organizational roles.

In management texts, management and control of operations is handled through the establishment of models and budgets of various kinds. Takes a broader view of operations. Follows this by consideration of modes of control for networks. Then considers financial control and clan control issues in embedded networks or chains of operations. In the first section develops some of the characteristics of the embedded firm. Follows this by a discussion of the problem of control in and out of chains of embedded firms. Examines the issues for financial control. Finally explores the social and organizational processes within and between partners in such chains.

The study of leadership or leader behaviour and the formation of leaders is a constant fascination and part of the agenda of this journal. This article sets out to argue for a richer framing of these studies to include society and organisations as well as psychology and personality. Reviews the way in which corporate leadership is caught up in wider societal understandings and suggests that the narrow goal of the principal and agent model is unsustainable. From the admission of the idea of institutionalisation of leaders, argues that it would be necessary to extend the study field to include social theory as well as critical social theory as this latter illuminates the way things are taken to be. The knowledge of leader formation has been shown to be limited and it is argued for a multidisciplinary extension to formation studies that contextualises leadership formation in social and organisational processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how changes in the management control systems (MCS) of post-secondary institutions (PSIs) in Western Canada can be described and explained in terms of formal and informal MCS; and whether and how changes in the MCS of PSIs in Western Canada can be described and explained in terms of an integrative contingency-based framework of MCS based on regulatory accountability systems, competitive markets and organizational culture?

The empirical research was undertaken with an exploratory mixed design. The first phase involved descriptive univariate and bivariate statistics as well as non-parametric statistics computed on data from annual reports and financial statements of 46 PSIs in Western Canada to quantitatively explore MCS. The second phase involved the grounded theory (GT) analysis of annual reports of 46 PSIs in Western Canada to qualitatively explore formal MCS in relation to changes in contingencies. The third phase involved the GT analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews of senior managers from PSIs in Western Canada to qualitatively explore informal MCS in relation to formal MCS and changes in contingencies.

The research showed that emphasis on formal MCS in Western Canadian PSIs resulted in biased compliance within informal MCS. The exploratory research also demonstrated that the distinction between formal and informal MCS was better understood in a wider framing of MCS in terms of regulatory accountability systems, competitive markets and organizational culture.

This research led to the elaboration of an exploratory theoretical framework to subsume the distinction between formal and informal MCS into an integrative contingency-based framework of MCS.