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The purpose of this paper is to explore how risk management is supported by and interacts with process or transactions “technologies” to inform and influence organizational behavior as it changes in the face of risk. Accounting systems represent a collection of processes that are designed to support broader organizational or firm activities. As such, they represent information processes that help inform finance management and control, strategy, and risk management.

The paper synthesizes work relating to transaction cost economics that describes the nature of the organization and indicate how this perspective may be developed to incorporate the dynamic forces that change an organization’s approach to risk. From a practical perspective, the value, relevance and limitations of accounting information may be more clearly determined.

The information perspective of accounting helps practitioners understand and decide how activities within their organization have impact and are related with one another. In this sense, accounting is not merely a book keeping system, nor a payments process, nor merely a narrow functional device that seeks to minimize tax liabilities, for example. Instead, accounting-based information conveys the importance of context and of viewing the organization as a whole as an open system within the organization that both transmits and receives information, including accounting information, and then adapts and co-evolves with whole-organizational forces to shape how the firm responds to environmental factors, such as risk.

The paper raises challenges to the conceptualization and compartmentalization of risk as typified in risk management frameworks such as COSO and provides direction and focus to identify how accounting systems can contribute to risk management.

The paper offers a perspective that allows us to synthesize our understanding of how management can seek to manage risk by seeing risk as part of a broader range of “transactions technologies” with which a firm engages. It identifies how accounting technologies interact with risk in shaping organizational or whole firm, architecture as an adaptation that mitigates or embraces risk.

Kinship structures in Ambridge have been analysed using social network analysis (SNA) showing a network of a ‘small world’ type with 75 individual people linked by birth or marriage. Further, the network shows four major cliques: the first two centred on Aldridge and Archer matriarchies and the second where through the marriages of the third generation the Grundies, Carters, Bellamies and Snells connect together. The chapter considers the possible futures for kinship networks in the village, arguing either a version of the status quo or The Headlam Hypothesis through which Archers assume less importance and the strength of the weak ties in the network assume more prominence.

Ambridge residents live with extended kin and non-family members much more often than the population of the United Kingdom as a whole. This chapter explores cultural norms, economic need, and family and health care to explain patterns of coresidence in the village of Ambridge. In landed families, filial obligation and inheritance norms bind multigenerational families to a common dwelling, while scarcity of affordable rural housing inhibits residential independence and forces reliance on access to social networks and chance to find a home among the landless. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, coresidence wards off loneliness among unpartnered adults. Finally, for Archers listeners, extended kin and non-kin coresidence creates a private space where dialogue gives added dimensionality and depth to characters who would otherwise be known only through their interactions in public spaces.

The introduction of market forces into the NHS has led to an operational divorce between health care providers and those who need health‐care. Central to this change has been the widespread use of contracts. As a management problem, contract negotiation must incorporate consideration of full cost recovery to establish prices for hospital services sold and to ensure that available information is employed in assessing external services purchased. Ignoring the important issue of information availability in identifying relevant costs, it is the difficulty in specifying the cost of an episode of treatment, for example, that has led to contracts being negotiated in block form. Argues that this may be the only contract that can be effectively established. An important consequence of this is that the complexity of hospital services and requirements will work against a wider implementation of piecemeal managed competition and will form a natural barrier to market forces in the NHS.

Examines the nature of performance measurement in the NHS in its relation to the principal objectives of a public health service. Argues that existing measures (bed and theatre utilization, budget deficits, and so on) can give rise to situations which are in conflict with such objectives. Suggests performance measures should reflect the purpose of a public health services. One way this may be achieved is by use of an adjusted or weighted throughout measure which provides an indication of the level of utilization of (largely) fixed resources. Once adopted as a performance measure, throughput efficiency, established in the context of clinical objectives and available resources at unit level gives rise to quite different conclusions as to the effectiveness of existing health care delivery than has traditionally been the case.

New research on the role of habits and rules in working practices could have a significant impact on the way management understands the routines subordinate individuals use and how effective change may be brought about. Whilst generally applicable, the benefits of understanding such routines, and how and why they should be encouraged, is highly visible in the public sector where multiple goals are commonplace.

Capital budgeting in a live environment is crucially influenced by exposure to risk. Argues that while there are many risk analysis techniques that could be used to assist with investment appraisal (for example the incorporation of risk premiums in discount rates, simulation, sensitivity analysis, etc.), it is not often recognized that the most widely used method – net present value (NPV) and nearly all of its variants – will often lead to incorrect conclusions when exposure to risk is not correctly incorporated. When risk is properly accounted for, surprising results emerge in evaluating project viability and sensitivity with respect to risk.

The widespread adoption and implementation of costing systems in the UK National Health Service (NHS) has been an important part of the response to the structural changes brought about in the health sector over the last 20 years. One key feature of costing systems in this context is to provide a guide by which efficiency and effectiveness may be measured against a background of decision making in a public service environment where the public service provision ethos is important. Re‐assesses the role of costing systems in the NHS in the light of research on rules and habit formation in the decision‐making process. In developing these points further argues that bureaucracies provide an important linkage in marshalling implicit habitual behaviour to multiple‐organisational goals. In so doing, bureaucratic structures represent part of the mechanism which facilitates effective organisational performance. Such performance is made efficient through the use of accounting systems which measure performance and provide signals for resource allocation via quasi‐costs (or the internal quasi‐transfer prices), although the extent of the usefulness of such signals is questioned. In particular, argues that there is no connection between the market, such as it is, and intra‐hospital resource allocations, at least not in a direct manner, nor in any manner in the short term.

In March 2015, following unseasonable heavy precipitation, the River Am burst its banks flooding the village of Ambridge and causing one death and numerous injuries. The lines between fiction and reality became blurred when the BBC offered updates about the weather situation in Ambridge through social media. However, in fiction, as in reality, memories are short; recent village gossip in Ambridge has been dominated by other matters including a certain murder trial and the mix-up with Jill Archer’s chutney. The flood has come and gone.

In this chapter, I will examine the response to, and recovery from, the floods in Ambridge in order to ascertain what lessons have been learned, and whether enough has been done to make Ambridge more resilient to future floods events. I will show how the programme raised important issues in relation to flooding management in England today, and focus upon the increasing responsibilisation of citizens, the tension which exists between framing the flood response in terms of ‘resilience’ or ‘vulnerability’, and the need for people to find someone or something to blame for their misfortune. I conclude that The Archers could play a critical role in maintaining flood awareness in the future.