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Environmental audit is a growth area which has received little attention in the auditing literature. There is currently no mandatory requirement for companies to undergo environmental audit, although pressures on them to do so are growing, and there are no generally accepted standards regulating the nature of audit work. In the absence of standards, the views of individual practitioners will have a decisive effect on the form of the audit. Summarizes the results of a questionnaire survey of environmental consultants aimed at ascertaining what kind of audit work they do and what their views are about the nature of the audit. In particular, examines the contention that there are two competing and incompatible views of environmental audit – audit as managerial aid and audit as an independent critique of environmental performance. Environmental consultants come from differing professional backgrounds – engineers, environmental scientists, accountants and management consultants are all involved in environmental consultancy. Examines the possibility that practitioners from different backgrounds have fundamentally different approaches to the audit. Suggests that practitioners′ views are often contradictory, with little perception of the tension between the two roles suggested for audit. It appears that environmental audit is at a crucial stage of development as a discipline and its future will be shaped by the standards that the new profession evolves.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect back over his career as a management and business historian so far as to consider opportunities for the future of management and business history as a disciplinary area.

The paper consists of two segments – the first half is an auto-ethnographic personal reflection looking at the author’s research journey and how the discipline as experienced by the author has evolved over that time. The second half is a prescriptive look forward to consider how we should leverage the strengths as historians to progress the discipline forward.

The paper demonstrates opportunities for management and business history to encompass new agendas including the expansion of the topic into teaching, the possibility for the advancement of empirical contributions and opportunities for findings in new research areas, including the global south and public and project management history.

The paper demonstrates that historians should be more confident in the disciplinary capabilities, particularly their understandings of historic context, continuity, change and chronologies when making empirical and theoretical contributions.

Although it is commonly assumed that comparative studies are the best way to proceed in constructing theories of organizing, the practical fulfillment of this postulate has always been problematic. For example, anthropologists should have given organization theorists a clue long ago: they made the stories of their exotic localities interesting by using a variety of fictional approaches in their reporting. The purpose of this paper is to call for the development of anthropologies of organization through “distant reading” of novels.

The paper uses insights from literary theory, notably Iser and Moretti, to discuss the benefits of “distant readings” of novels for scholars and students within the discipline of organization studies.

Distant readings can make it possible for those studying organizations to consider novels as sources in historical anthropology; can enable an exploration of the theories embedded in the novel; can contribute to advancement in approaches to reading fieldwork material, and can help organization theorists better delineate the boundaries of their own literary genre.

The paper broadens the understanding of the relationship between the novel and organization through explaining how reading novels through the glasses of an organization theoretician might produce “novel readings” but also novel insights into the practices of organizing – across times and places.

This paper aims to explore accounting across time and space via novels.

The paper uses distant readings.

The paper reveals peculiarities and commonalities of the work of Certified Public Accountants 70 years ago and now.

The originality/value is to be decided by readers.