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The development of the ResIDe Electronic Library at the University of the West of England, Bristol, is traced from its origins as an eLib funded research project. Different aspects of the system are analysed through their potential to increase economy, efficiency and effectiveness in library services. This analysis is related to the utility that it can provide to differing sponsors and the likelihood of their making supporting resources available. While economy and efficiency are relatively easy concepts to define and use, effectiveness can be both contested and multifaceted, varying in accordance with both subjective preference and interests represented. Competing views of effectiveness needed to be balanced whilst emphasising those aspects of the system that would appeal to senior UWE management in a time of the rising “audit society” in higher education.

Questions the view that management accounting information has failed to keep pace with changes in manufacturing processes over the years and that the information currently provided is largely irrelevant to the needs of managers. Presents a study, the results of which suggest that this may not, in fact, be the case and that managers generally do find information on standard costing and budgeting useful.

Communications regarding this column should be addressed to Mrs. Cheney, Peabody Library School, Nashville, Tenn. 37203. Mrs. Cheney does not sell the books listed here. They are available through normal trade sources. Mrs. Cheney, being a member of the editorial board of Pierian Press, will not review Pierian Press reference books in this column. Descriptions of Pierian Press reference books will be included elsewhere in this publication.

The technique of ABC has been widely adopted by universities in the UK, with the assumption that the more accurate identification of costs makes them more manageable. It is the purpose of this paper to consider this question of manageability through identification and allocation in the university sector and to question this as a basis for decision making and resource allocation. The type of costing systems in place in an organisation must meet the needs of the organisation as a whole and there are a number of factors that will affect the type of costing system that is required and there are a number of costing systems that can be used. This paper considers the use of ABC within a university and whether school costing and course costing can meet the requirements of a university facing a challenging business environment where a significant amount of pressure is being exerted on the financial stability of some universities. In doing so the ability of ABC to satisfy the informational requirements of a university is called into question.

This paper aims to examine the historical evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking in management accounting. As an organising framework, this paper applies the lens of management fashion theory, which is a perspective that is well suited to the examination of the lifecycles of management accounting concepts and ideas.

This paper pursues a bibliographic approach to better understand the past and present state of activity-based thinking. Thus, this paper attempts to piece together a mosaic picture by synthesising existing research on activity-based thinking from a wide range of academic and practitioner-oriented sources.

While the original activity-based costing (ABC) model has evolved and broadened and has generated new related concepts, studies suggest that it is not as successful as accounting concepts such as the balanced scorecard. The overall popularity trajectory of activity-based thinking can be considered to be negative, and it is currently not receiving much attention in accounting journals.

This paper is based on desk research and is limited by a reliance on secondary sources. In addition, it may be subject to the authors’ own biases when it comes to defining relevant articles studied.

This paper provides more insight into the evolution and popularity of activity-based thinking and discusses some of the reasons why it is not more widely used in practice.

Although many studies have examined the diffusion of ABC-related techniques, most are quite dated. More than 30 years have passed since the coining of the ABC term, and the time is ripe to provide a historical re-examination of the impact of this type of thinking in the field of accounting and to consider the latest developments and trends.

This chapter overviews and briefly presents the literature concerning women and science from the field of feminist science studies (FSS). A major and time-consuming challenge encountered during the process of this review was organising the highly varied subtopics into meaningful categories. For the sake of easy understanding, we begin the study by describing the field of science and technology study (STS) and then we move on to discuss the origin of FSS and major strands of intersection between science and feminist epistemology.

EVIDENCE of the importance which automation is assuming comes from the Institution of Production Engineers, who announce that they will hold a National Conference in Margate from 16th to 19th June, 1955, when it is proposed to examine the implications of the automatic factory, and to promote discussion on the technical, sociological and managerial problems involved. The impact on smaller factories will be particularly considered.

The whole kingdom from north to south at the time of writing is enveloped in freezing Arctic weather, reminiscent of the North Russian campaign of long ago. The normal winter is relatively mild, mainly a Westerly pattern, occasionally wild and windy, wet with a rare cold “snap”. There are variations in the pattern, damp and warm in the south‐west, few frosts and rarely any snow; in the north of the country, Scotland, much colder, with the south‐east partaking of the weather pattern of the land mass of the Continent. The variations appear more of the mild weather in the South and colder, appreciably, in the North; recalling service personnel stationed at Gosport who did not need an overcoat all winter, whereas in the North, many found it necessary to wear a light overcoat tor most of the year, the south‐east corner of England, obtaining no help from the warming Gulf Stream, often gets the worst of the weather, which it has done to a very considerable extent in this winter.

The paper's aim is to establish how world class manufacturing (WCM) was diffused to some small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises in the NW of England and the network of institutions involved ranging from the state to firms, and to iterate the results with Miller and O'Leary's work on accounting practices and governance.

This followed an actor network theory approach of “following the actors and actants” using interviews and documentation.

Three accountabilities (financial, production, and idealised customer) at firm and state levels were linked through agencies like consultants, academics, and employer federations, and quasi‐governmental organisations like training and enterprise councils. New discourses and programmes of governance associated with competitiveness fostered changes in accountability locally and nationally. Competitiveness, WCM, and occasional allies like activity‐based costing lacked stable and consistent definition. They are adopted and circulate because their plasticity helps actors redefine themselves within translation and mediation processes.

Shop floor workers were not directly studied. Hence, observations on resistance and enactment are tentative.

Continual translations within large networks shape new techniques of management and governance.

The paper shows that programmes and discourses of governance over time are reciprocally linked in a constellation of state institutions and firms.