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Shortly before the Second World War, a woman who had never accepted her orphan status, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, nicknamed ‘Little Coco’ by her father and known as ‘Coco’ to her relatives, became the first women in history to build a world-class industrial empire. By 1935, Coco, a fashion designer and industry captain, was employing more than 4,000 workers and had sold more than 28,000 dresses, tailored jackets and women's suits. Born into a poor family and raised in an orphanage, she enjoyed an intense social life in Paris in the 1920s, rubbing shoulders with artists, creators and the rising stars of her time.

Thanks to her entrepreneurial skills, she was able to innovate in her methods and in her trendsetting approach to fashion design and promotion. Coco Chanel was committed and creative, had the soul of an entrepreneur and went on to become a world leader in a brand new sector combining fashion, accessories and perfumes that she would help shape. By the end of her life, she had redefined French elegance and revolutionized the way people dressed.

The French strong stare tradition decisively shapes both its past and present development of public administration. France created some of the earliest continental administrative institutions and the first studies of public administration. The development of the French liberal stare in the 19th century led to the predominance of law and lawyers emphasizing the guarantee of citizens’ rights and limits on state power. The shift to law eclipsed social science-based public administration. Since the 1960s, for various reasons, France has witnessed the reemergence of a broader administrative science, with law-based models competing with managerial and sociological-based models. Today several analytical approaches exist, reflecting a complex and rich pluralism, although legal dogma remains strong and poses dilemmas for the independence of French administrative sciences.

In England and Wales the Crown Prosecutor is a lawyer who is independent from the investigation and is charged with assessing evidence and evaluating whether a prosecution should proceed or not. The CPS is intentionally authorised to override the decisions of the police to curb any potentially over‐zealous investigations and evidence gathering that might subsequently tarnish the standards of procedure in the courts when applying the criminal law. The increasingly burdensome rules of disclosure have made demands on the CPS which are akin to the overall requirement on the investigating magistrate of civil law jurisdictions to find the truth by examination of the prosecution and defence evidence. The recent moves to return a limited number of lawyers to police stations is a further indication that the future role of the CPS may include an active rather than solely passive role in evidence gathering. The Serious Fraud Office are directly involved in the investigation and prosecution of complex frauds. This office has statutory and judicial authority to conduct investigations which follow an inquisitorial rather than accusatorial model. The juge d'instruction in France has authority to direct and control police investigations and subsequently to compile a dossier of evidence for presentation before a trial court. This paper points out that there are close parallels emerging in pre‐trial procedures in England and Wales and in France and the criticisms of the role of the investigating magistrate, the ‘sick man’, may hold lessons to be learnt for investigators and prosecutors within this jurisdiction.

Military planning has various authors. The kings and emperors of old decided on whom to make war, where and when, with what, and for how long. The British Empire was built on economic push and domination abroad via a strong fleet. When Prussia united Germany in the nineteenth century, the planning task became that of the army's general staff. After Marxism‐Leninism gripped Russia in the twentieth century, plans and strategy emerged from the fountain‐head of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but were entrusted to the generals for execution. In twenty‐first century USA there is a formalized structure for defence projection, yet parties outside the government may have an unusual voice in military planning.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect upon the use of the term accountability in the twenty‐first century and its role in “remaking the world in favour of the most powerful” using the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Lacan.

The paper examines the notion of accountability by analyzing a case study of the hostile takeover of Manchester United Football Club by the Glazer family. The field of football presents an interesting arena in which to study accountability because of its extremely interested and active fans who search for information on every aspect of their clubs. Lacanian theory is drawn upon to add to understanding of the psychopathology which the demands for accountability and transparency place on individuals. Bourdieu's work on illusio is drawn upon to understand the motivations of the field of football.

The paper finds that calls to “hold the most powerful to account” in practice lack political force. Thus the case study demonstrates the common (mis)recognition of the term of accountability. The ability to correct the abuses of the most powerful requires power.

The conflation of Bourdieu and Lacan adds to understanding of accountability as an empty cipher with performative power.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between language, thinking and society for explaining the degree of visibility of the French organizational studies (OS) production.

This paper proposes a sociological analysis based on Bourdieu field to understand the variation of reception the French OS production have had among the Anglo-Saxon field. The paper aims to underline some key elements, which can explain the differences of reception experienced by the French OS scientists. The paper opted for a general review using historical data; reviews of OS literature; and Google scholar, Web of Science and major OS Journal data.

The paper provides some evidence about how the degree of visibility of the French OS production is related to translation, cognitive and social resonance, producer place in the scientific network and relationship between the fields. It suggests that the degree of visibility is the result of a complex set of socio-cognitive schemes, social issues raised by the scholar and the place occupied by the researcher in the field.

The paper brings interesting ideas concerning the international development of the OS field, the degree of visibility of diverse contributions coming from non-English speaking researchers, notably the French ones, and how the dialogue between different linguistic and social universes can be ameliorated.