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The purpose of this report is to review the seminar on “The credit crunch: gender equality in hard times” held 6 March 2009 at Queens' College, Cambridge, UK.

The seminar seeks to inform members of the general public and academia about the – possibly – differential impact of the credit crunch on men and women. The meeting included four presentations by invited speakers.

As of now, economic indicators do not seem to show a differential impact of the economic downturn on men and women. However, unemployment and redundancy rates might underestimate the impact on women because they often do not register as unemployed if they have an employed partner. Past recessions have shown that insecure employment can be as bad as or even worse than unemployment for psychological well‐being.

The seminar brought together four speakers who considered the impact of the current recession on gender equality from different perspectives. It was held shortly after official statistics confirmed that the British economic is now in a recession, and the seminar theme was therefore highly topical.

Temporary workers have many human resource and labour market implications. These consequences are further influenced with the introduction of new legislation relating to temporary workers. The purpose of this article is to present research on the impacts of the legislation – Fixed Term Employees Regulations and Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses Regulations – on temporary workers in the labour force.

Information from 24 Labour Force Surveys, conducted between December 1997 and November 2003, were analysed with two longitudinal Labour Force Surveys. Qualitative data was also gathered from six temporary worker employers and 17 agency workers.

Analysis of data demonstrated that the utilisation of temporary workers had declined in the labour force: Temporary workers had decreased in real terms by 24 per cent and agency workers who were less regulated by only 11 per cent. Also, an increased take‐up of permanent work by temporary workers was found post‐legislation (27 per cent) compared with pre‐legislation (22 per cent).

Some limitations exist in the study using National Statistics and qualitative data to analyse labour force dynamics. Further research is warranted in this area investigating how strategic decisions in utilising temporary workers are formed and how recent legislation has influenced these policies.

Changes in temporary worker legislation have direct consequences to the labour force.

The paper reveals the decline of temporary workers in the labour force between 1997 and 2003 and examines specific legislation, which may have influenced this phenomenon.

A methodology for implementing CAPM systems is described. The research was motivated by evidence of dissatisfaction with the performance of current systems, and the existence of no generic methodology. A superposition process was employed. Areas of functional management were explored for sources of implementation methodologies and yielded a number of attributes for successful implementation. The emergent structure was then validated against field studies. The result, a methodology for improving control, is a three‐level hierarchy. The first level assesses the ability of the organisation to absorb change. The next considers the options for better control. The lowest level is concerned with implementation.

Healthy employee relations are important for individual well-being and are likely to contribute towards job satisfaction and other positive work outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of worker relations and proposes a new three-component model of worker relations which embraces the relationships that employees have with their co-workers, supervisor and the organisation.

A 20-item inventory was tested using data collected in a local authority (n=157) and led to the retention of nine items which were embodied in a scale for further evaluation. A second study using data using obtained in an emergency call management service (n=85) were used to further evaluate the factor structure of the scale and assess its predictive validity. A third study (n=70) provided further information on the measure.

The new nine-item measure is a viable instrument with adequate reliability for assessing three levels of worker relations. In line with predictions, the three sub-scales (co-worker, supervisor and organisation) were positively correlated with job satisfaction and social relations.

The new scale provides a freely available and parsimonious alternative to existing measures of worker relations.

The paper considers the component aspects of worker relations before defining, theorising and developing a general purpose short instrument capable of quantitatively measuring worker relations.

According to an extensive and growing literature, we are in the twilight of bureaucracy. The labels applied to the supposed new organizational form include: post‐bureaucratic; post‐modern; post‐hierarchical; and the virtual organisation. The purpose of this paper is to consider the various claims for “epochal” change by evaluating the supporting and contrary evidence.

The paper draws on evidence on the reform of the UK Civil Service over the last few decades to show the intensification of bureaucracy.

The paper takes issue with the “epochalist” visions of sudden transformation which have underpinned much of the comment on post‐bureaucracy, arguing that the concept of post‐bureaucracy is analytically blind to the diversity and complexity of contemporary organizational change.

Locating the debate on post‐bureaucracy in the broader political economy of Neo‐Conservatism reveals an authoritarian dimension which has been absent from most commentaries.

The main argument of this paper is that the accounting profession in Canada exercises hegemonic leadership over the development of tax education in terms of cadence and direction of reforms. To support this argument, the paper uses the development of the microeconomic approach to teaching taxation and the correlation between the numbers of tax courses taught in undergraduate programs and exemptions provided by the provincial institutes of the Canadian Chartered Accountants to students joining them. It uses arguments from institutional isomorphism to elucidate expected resistance to adopting new developments, such as the microeconomic approach, in the accounting field. The paper also builds on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony to imply that business schools have given their consent to the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants by closely linking their curriculum, at least the taxation courses, to that of the institute.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accounting in shaping charities' financial resilience during the COVID-19 crisis.

A case study of a charity was conducted. The financial resilience framework (Barbera et al., 2017) was applied to explore how accounting contributes to charities' capacity to cope with crises.

The results show how the accounting practices of budgeting, forecasting and performance reporting (financial and nonfinancial), as well as “accounting talk,” form part of the anticipatory and coping capacities that provided the charity the financial resilience to navigate the COVID-19 crisis.

The paper evidences the important role accounting plays in establishing financial resilience to help charities cope with crises, particularly the importance of having accounting practices established prior to a crisis and accounting information forming part of managers' discussions. The study also demonstrates that financial reserves have an important buffering capacity role.

This is the first paper to examine the role of accounting within a charity during an economic crisis. The authors explore the role of accounting in shaping a charity's financial resilience and demonstrate the applicability of the financial resilience framework to a sudden, unexpected crisis such as COVID-19. They extend the accounting talk literature by highlighting its importance to a charity and during a crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to examine an ongoing process of logic assimilation within an amateur sports organisation (ASO) called the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). It seeks to develop our understanding of how forms of accounting mitigated (or exacerbated) the tensions that arose among GAA members due to the consequences of the assimilation of select elements of a professional logic and a commercial logic within its traditionally dominant social welfare logic.

Interviews were undertaken with representatives and members of the GAA to understand the effects of growing commercialisation and professionalisation on the organisation’s traditional amateur status and social mission. In particular, the authors sought to understand how accounting, in the form of financial reporting, influenced the extent of the tensions that arose. Interviews were supported by an extensive collection of podcasts and news articles that discussed this topic.

The paper’s findings offer unique empirical insights into the role played by forms of accounting in the maintenance of amateurism within an ASO. It reveals the conflicting role of financial reporting within the GAA whereby it was used by the GAA’s management to ease member concerns surrounding logic assimilation while simultaneously being ignored by clubs and counties to facilitate payments to managers thereby eroding the amateur status of Gaelic Games.

The paper is unique in its exploration of logic assimilation within a form of hybrid organisation that has previously been unexamined in the accounting literature. It extends extant understandings of how accounting influences the co-existence of potentially conflicting logics. The paper also discusses the implications of what accounting makes visible and keeps invisible on the longevity of the traditionally dominant social welfare logic within an ASO.

The purpose of this research is to investigate and critically assess the notions of “information poverty” in LIS by highlighting its connections with development discourse.

The article takes a discourse analysis approach, which starts from Michel Foucault's understanding of discourse. “Information poverty” is posited as a statement and investigated in its relation to other statements. The focus is on discursive procedures that emerge from the repeated connections between statements. The article draws on the interpretative analysis of 35 English language articles published in scholarly and professional LIS journals between 1995 and 2005.

“Information poverty” and the “information poor” are established as being assigned specific positions in the discourse of LIS as the result of overlapping, sometimes conflicting discursive procedures. The concept emerges as a possibility in LIS by anchoring it in the dominant discourse of development. Traces of development discourse surface in LIS and contribute to the legitimisation of the concept of “information poverty” by lending it authority.

The material selection is linguistically biased. Results and findings are fully applicable only in an English language context.

The article relates the professional discourse of LIS to the dominant discourse of development and thus highlights some of the assumptions upon which the concept of “information poverty” is built. Moreover, the article is intended to contribute to the further development of discourse analysis in LIS.

This paper aims to bring to the fore some conditions of possibility surrounding the audit society thesis that might have contributed to construct a sense of distinctiveness around it, thereby facilitating its spread and travel in the accounting research community (and beyond) as a meaningful epistemological agenda.

My argument is that the aura of distinctiveness surrounding the audit society thesis as a noteworthy epistemological agenda relates to outsider influences, concept plasticity, and in-depth persuasiveness. I discuss these three features of distinctiveness through excerpts from the book and my own interpretations, the whole analytic process being circumscribed by a disciplined imagination exercise (Weick, 1989).

While the webs of unpredictability surrounding social life necessarily influenced the travel of the audit society thesis in academia, it seems to me that the thesis’ journey may have been helped by the author’s outsider status, the malleability of the thesis’ key concepts, and the medium (as a book) through which the thesis was articulated (which provided a persuasive platform to underline and demonstrate the depth of the argument).

In an age where journal rankings abound, the audit society thesis constitutes a telling demonstration that one can have a meaningful impact in setting an epistemological agenda and consolidate her/his scholarly reputation through the publication of a scholarly book.