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June Pallot was a very warm, kind person with an infectious, bubbly laugh. We last spoke on 5th October 2004, one month before she passed away. I still remember her warm, friendly voice from that last conversation. Behind this warm persona, there was a first class mind, an outstanding intellect. We met the way many academics do – I was an anonymous reviewer of her work and I was impressed by its quality and the thoughtfulness of her responses to the issues raised. Subsequently, we met when June Pallot was on a visit to Scotland with her husband, Graeme Craigie, a New Zealander of Scottish descent. June Pallot visited me at Stirling, where I was then professor of accounting. We had a very detailed discussion of governmental accounting, in which her depth of knowledge was impressive. We became so engrossed in this discussion that June almost forgot that Graeme was waiting patiently for her in the car park.

The paper explores the rapidly changing environment affecting universities and their research communities. It sets out to explore the effect of university corporatisation on research and teaching, and aims to identify likely coping strategies for researchers. The role of AAAJ in supporting research in this turbulent environment is then considered.

The paper employs a literature‐based analysis, critique and argument. The paper's scope includes the teaching and research by academic scholars in a corporate university environment.

Universities and their research are increasingly becoming revenue‐seeking, market driven corporatised university tools. Researchers are increasingly subject to pressures to accept higher workloads, pursue aggressive revenue targets, and to conduct and publish research that fits management imposed key performance indicators. This leads to a packaging and commodification of research with a short term, status‐seeking and fund‐raising emphasis.

Scholars need innovative but disciplined approaches to coping with such pressures in order to maintain pursuit of path‐breaking and significant additions to knowledge.

Personal values and commitment by individual scholars, as well as scholarly networks and support mechanisms will be the long‐term key to future research of value to the community.

The paper alerts researchers to the impact on their work on current institutional, economic and political forces surrounding universities, and highlights the consequent corporatisation and commercialisation of universities. It offers a realistic assessment of the current research environment and reinforces the need for individual researcher reassessments and strategies.

To provide comment on June Pallot's contribution to public policy debate in New Zealand.

A review of June's CV, interview and discussions with former colleagues from Wellington, and personal recollections of discussions.

Provides information about the manner in which public policy development and debate occurs in New Zealand, June's sustained efforts to contribute, and the contrast with her efforts at international level.

This paper points out that although this prominent international academic was marginalised and ignored in her own country, she continued trying to contribute to public policy development in her own country as well as internationally.

Kathleen Gallagher wrote this poem for June Pallot, her friend of some 25 years, who died as she lived, clearly, simply, with courage, and always in light.

Written by close friend and poet.

Captures June's optimism and continued work on public policy issues despite increasing physical frailty.

For June's many international friends and colleagues who were unable to see her during the last couple of years, the poem captures her attitudes and activities.

My first scheduled meeting with June ended up with my not meeting her at all! But the circumstances of this occasion do provide the opportunity to give a flavour of this extraordinarily talented woman that we have sadly lost. It was August 1993 and I was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where she spent the last seven years of her busy and highly successful life. She was at this time on the staff of Victoria University in Wellington. I was invited to present a paper to the Department and gladly accepted since this would have given me an opportunity to meet June who had first come to my attention through her work on developing a theoretical framework for public sector accounting. On my arrival in Wellington I received a note from June to say that sadly, and with immense regret, she couldn't be at the seminar since she had to attend an important meeting with the Auditor General of New Zealand, which, despite her wish to meet me, was a commitment she just couldn't avoid. In fact, as I discovered, she had just started a two‐year secondment to the New Zealand Audit Office reporting directly to the Auditor General with a major policy brief that transpired to be highly influential to New Zealand Government thinking.

Suggests a notion of community assets based on common property that recognizes the fundamental importance of accountability and democratic control over resources in the public sector, the sociopolitical nature of accounting, and the need to give visibility to public as well as private interests. The development of such a concept has immediate effects on the way the accounting entity and the relationship between government and society are viewed and may even have ramifications for accounting in the “private” sector.

Public private partnerships (PPPs) are a recent extension of what has now become well known as the “new public management” agenda for changes in the way public services are provided. PPPs involve organisations whose affiliations lie in respectively the public and private sectors working together in partnership to provide public services. This special issue of the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal explores this new development, which, in its most advanced form, is contained in the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) but is now spreading across the world in multiple forms. This introduction provides an overview of this development as well as an outline of the seven papers that make up this special issue. These seven papers are divided into two parts – the first four looking at different aspects of PFI and the latter three providing three country‐based (from the USA, New Zealand and Australia) studies of PFI/PPP. Many questions about the nature, regulation, pre‐decision analysis and post‐project evaluation are addressed in these papers but many research questions remain unanswered, as this Introduction makes plain.

This article explains the structures and rules built into the New Zealand government’s financial management system which encourage entry into commitments such as public private partnerships. That the system provides a means of escape from the tight constraints imposed by fiscal targets, and escapes public and parliamentary scrutiny in the process, seems at odds with espoused objectives of fiscal responsibility, debt reduction and transparency. In terms of furthering a privatization agenda, however, it is highly logical.

Recently the inclusion of land under roads as an asset in financial reports by Australian local governments has led to several concerns arising from dissatisfaction with certain elements of the new accounting standards and concepts, particularly, the Australian Accounting Standard AAS 27 “Financial Reporting by Local Governments” and the Standard Accounting Concepts SAC 4 “Definition and Recognition of the Elements of Financial Statements.” These concerns have also meant that most local governments are opposing the recognition of land under roads as an asset for financial reporting purposes. With the inclusion of land under roads dominating the asset element of financial reports, the relevance and reliability of valuation of land under roads needs to be examined. Using an Australian case, this paper examines whether this information provides greater relevance and reliability to users. The paper suggests that, as lands under roads do not affect the Council’s economic position and this information has no value to the users of the information, there is no point in increasing the council’s financial reporting costs.

This paper aims to examine an early stage of the institutionalization of accounting practices in devolved UK governments, concentrating on: the construction by devolved bodies of a “rational” set of planning and budgeting documents; the extent of homogeneity/heterogeneity in organizational response to seemingly similar institutional pressures; and politicians' cognition of accounting numbers.

The paper uses neo‐institutional theory to examine the planning and budgeting documents of the devolved bodies and material gathered from semi‐structured interviews.

The findings point to a process of nested translations, from mission through aims and objectives to targets, with accounting numbers present only in the last stage whereby time‐bounded targets are formulated and used to assess achievements. Because of the negotiations around the diverging interests of actors, the translation process is neither linear nor stable.

The paper contributes to the literature by: examining the emergence and use of new accounting and budgeting systems in political organizations; understanding the experience of institutionalization of accounting practices; and exploring the impact of accounting reform on political deliberation and joined‐up government.