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The purpose of this paper is to explore how hierarchical accountability can be enacted and accounting control systems mobilized in a way that promotes a sense of felt responsibility.

The paper draws on interviews, shadowing and observations to explore the implementation of a strategy for “increasing accountability” in a Norwegian Oil Company. The case provided an opportunity to explore the dynamics of hierarchical accountability and felt responsibility, and in particular Roberts (2009) concept of “intelligent accountability”, in an empirical context.

The case study explores how the strategy of increasing accountability at OilCo was enacted around three operational issues; the control of costs, roles and relationships in the complex matrix structure, and the operation of the management system. It traces how the long history of Beyond Budgeting practices and philosophy in OilCo resulted both in an explicit recognition of the incompleteness of accounting numbers, and trust-based practices which avoided many of the dysfunctional individual and organizational effects typically associated with the exercise of hierarchical control.

The paper explores empirically how OilCo’s embrace of Beyond Budgeting practices and philosophy had created the conditions under which a more intelligent form of accountability could emerge. As a European case study, it calls into question the Anglo-American tradition of accounting research which suggests that externally imposed accountability within a hierarchy mitigates against employees’ felt responsibility.

This paper proposes a research method for analysing talk about accounting concepts, systems and numbers. The authors argue that studying accounting talk in situ is a fruitful way to understand both the role accounting plays in the framing of relationships between individuals and the associated emotional content of these exchanges. As such, the authors argue that conversation analysis (CA) is a useful complement to interviews in qualitative research.

The authors introduce a specific approach to CA called positioning theory, which captures the linguistic and emotional subtleties embedded within interpersonal interactions, and the way accounting impacts and mediates these relations through measuring, assessment and control. The authors draw on one particularly animated conversation about accounting in a manufacturing company. The conversation was a largely emotional and animated exchange between individuals where talk about accounting was imbued with metaphors, violence, sex and humour.

While participants in conversations may appear to draw on similar forms of language and expression, CA allows researchers to see that the meaning of these shared expressions change based on who is saying them, whom they are saying them to and how they are saying them. Dissecting conversations as they unfold, offers a more nuanced and multifaceted understanding of accounting as central to the social fabric of organisational life.

As opposed to interviews, which often suffer from the rationality of hindsight (referred to as retrospective rationality), CA captures the unfolding nature of accounting talk in real-time–not upon reflection.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of consumers’ expectations and their antecedents on beliefs, attitude and behavioral intentions when they respond to new corporate social responsibility (CSR) information about a service firm.

Empirically, the authors measure prior beliefs, and then calibrate how those beliefs change in response to a piece of news. The authors develop a conceptual model articulating the nature and antecedents of three types of expectations: would, could and should. The authors use structural equation modeling to test how these expectations influence the consumer evaluation process.

The results show that the effect of could expectations on the evaluation process is felt via their influence on would expectations; that is, would expectations fully mediate the relationship between could expectations and attitude toward news. Similarly, attitude toward news fully mediates the relationship between would and should expectations and updated beliefs about the firm.

In the selected service industry, the findings show that expectations are mediated by the new information that consumers receive when they are updating their prior beliefs. The authors demonstrate the ability to understand the antecedents of expectations, which provides a vehicle by which the organization can influence the consumer evaluation process.

In practice, managers can identify the antecedents of consumer expectations and thus influence the reference points against which those consumers will evaluate news about their product.

CSR has important implications for multiple stakeholders and the authors calibrate the determinants of how news about the organization’s performance on it may affect consumer decision processes.

The paper introduces “could” expectations into the services literature, examines the antecedents of the different types of expectations, and studies how their effect is felt through the evaluation process.

In the March issue, John Wellens reviewed Roberts, White and Parker's study of THE CHARACTER‐TRAINING INDUSTRY. One of the statements in the book with which issue may be taken was that course organisers ‘proved rather ambivalent about having their schemes assessed by outsiders.’ In the first part of the following article, Peter Whitfield, a recent graduate from the MA course in Organisational Psychology at the University of Lancaster, presents some of the findings of just such an outside assessment of the Brathay Hall Month Course which was initiated at Brathay's request in 1973. The main findings of this specific assessment are at variance in many instances with the general conclusions drawn by the Roberts team, and a more detailed report is being prepared for publication elsewhere. In the second part, Chris Graham, Brathay's Development Tutor, reviews key issues determining current and future developments at the centre in the light of Peter Whitfield's work and in the context of Roberts, White and Parker's conclusions.

The premise that the U.S. Supreme Court never veers too far off from the dominant national political coalition (Dahl, 1957) has become widely accepted among social scientists today. To fulfill that promise, however, the confirmation process for justices must serve as a plebiscite through which the public can ratify or reject future justices based on their views. Unfortunately, modern confirmation hearings have become an exercise in obfuscation, providing little meaningful dialogue on important issues. Because conservative Republican presidents have made the lion's share of appointments in recent times, social conservatives have most often benefited from a process that has severed the link between Supreme Court nominees and the polity they must serve.

C. Herman Pritchett saw politics in law without losing the sense that law was not simply politics. This synthesis from the 1940s was lost in the last half of the 20th century and it deserves to be brought back. While denial that politics matters is a staple of Supreme Court confirmation hearings, this position is no longer credible. In constitutional law in particular, politics has pushed law aside in the minds of scholars, journalists, and many Americans. This makes it hard to find a place for law in the study of the Supreme Court. This chapter advocates a return to the balance that was in place over 50 years ago when we were first taught that Supreme Court decisions were political.

This chapter provides a taxonomy of key rolling stock types and covers the key engineering principles. This chapter concentrates on the aspects of the rolling stock that make it sustainable in terms of passenger transportation; these aspects are primarily safety and crashworthiness. These are specific items that contribute to make the rolling stock and hence rail system more sustainable; passengers need to be confident that they are travelling in safe rolling stock and the vehicle consist, manufacturing technique or materials used should not compromise the crashworthiness aspects. For this reason, all aspects of this chapter reference vehicle safety and crashworthiness.

The question of whether the words “American Dream” point to something of substance is at the heart of the authors' inquiry. James Truslow Adams coined the term in his 1933 book The Epic of America as a way to re‐establish a sense of optimism decimated by the Great Depression. Adams' contribution was to move the public discourse from that of individual effort to a sense of a collective identity. The American Dream is an element of the “cultural stuff” whose singularity (“dream”) rapidly breaks down into a variety of interpretations about the American nation (“dreams”). The popular press suggests that the Dream proposes to balance collective membership in a national identity with the individual freedom to achieve prosperity and success. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the Dream and the construction of an American identity by examining the accounts of men who surely represent the American Dream: US Presidential candidates.

In order to analyze the candidates' accounts of themselves as committed to their American identity and to the American Dream, the authors view the tax returns and speeches of Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney through the lens of the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and locate the American Dream as a construct of the imaginary and symbolic orders, as they are defined by Jacques Lacan. The inspirations for the authors' analysis are twofold. One is a 1953 report in which Lacan said, “The unconscious of the subject is the discourse of the other”. The authors argue that the American Dream is the “discourse of the other” and suggest that the American identity is decentered: i.e. a signifying construct (the American Dream) substitutes for identity. The second inspiration is a 2009 paper titled “No one is perfect” by John Roberts, who argues, “The ideal of a transparency pretends to a mere making visible […] [But] transparency works to advertise an ideal against which we will always fail”.

It was found that the candidates' efforts to be transparent advertise an ideal: in this study, the ideal is the ideal of a “perfect‐able” American who lives the American Dream. It is an ideal against which the candidates fail because it is the “discourse of the other”.

This study has limitations. The subjects are two American citizens and the authors' interpretation might not be appropriate to other American citizens and residents.

The authors are aware of no other study that uses Lacanian psychoanalytic views to examine the American Dream.