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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.

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.

This study describes the development of a grounded theory of applied critical thinking in leadership studies and examines how student-centered experiential learning in leadership education bridged critical thinking with action. Over three semester undergraduate students in an upper level leadership studies course at a large four-year public institution in the southeastern United States completed a written assignment in which they were asked to define the concept of “leading critically.” A grounded theory of critical leadership – utilizing critical thinking skills to make decisions about leadership actions in different situations – emerged after completing a qualitative document analysis of these papers and incorporating the researchers’ existing knowledge of leadership and student development theory. The hope is that this research will create dialogue concerning new approaches to leadership education and encourage practices that apply critical thinking skills to leadership.

A composite of personal views of public health physicians and managers. Identifies common themes – extension of public health medicine beyond NHS, role of other professions, need for corporacy and teamwork, adequate resourcing, need for collaboration between doctors and managers.

To chart the influence of politics on the future of China’s economy this article draws on the insights of four experts to delineate a range of possibilities.

To better understand the factors at work the author considers the logic and research undergirding four experts’ different views of the unfolding interplay of China’s politics and its economy.

The four vies of China’s political and economic future: (1) A post-democratic future: Eric Li, a venture capitalist, is optimistic that today’s Chinese Communist Party can successfully meet the country’s challenges going forward. (2) China’s trapped transition: Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, worries that political inertia may be coupled with an extended period of economic stagnation. (3) Reform, innovation and growth: Yasheng Huang, a professor of global ei8conomics and management at MIT with deep knowledge of China’s economy and Chinese business, is relatively optimistic, seeing political reform as a potential springboard for continued economic dynamism. (4) The coming Communist Party crackup: David Shambaugh, a professor of international affairs and director of the China policy program at George Washington University, suggests the increasing possibility of a coup and worries about the potential political and economic turmoil associated with such an action.

To really take advantage of its R&D investments, China needs a stronger market-based economic system, a more open and democratic political system, and a rule-based legal system that offers strong intellectual property protection.

The diverse set of possibilities for China’s political and economic future provide executives with a guide for interpreting current events as they play out.