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The new economy, or knowledge‐based era, not only brings with it additional challenges to the employee communication process, but also inspired solutions. Historically, employee communication has been constrained by the limitations of traditional media. The choice of media for the dissemination of information has increased over the years but none has had the potential to galvanise broad‐sweeping changes to the process as have intranets. To maximise the benefits for their organisations, communicators must become comfortable working with the new technology, progress up the technology‐adoption curve, learn to balance tech with touch, and be prepared to deconstruct previously held models of communication.

Defines polychronic time as the consumer’s ability to do a number of things at once and explains that it has been studied by researchers in an attempt to understand how individuals regard new products and services and their potential to save time or enhance polychronicity. Examines the literature on this subject with particular reference to Internet marketing. Generates a number of hypotheses for future research.

For most airlines, the last 12 months have proved to be some of the hardest their balance sheets are ever likely to suffer. Big names have gone, even bigger ones are balancing on the brink, and thousands of jobs have been lost. The far‐reaching impact of shattered passenger confidence, escalating security costs and increasing competition from low‐cost rivals has left many of the larger carriers reeling. But while US Airways appears to be raising the white flag as it flies its planes into the Mojave Desert for storage, others are attempting to fight back. At British Airways (BA) the restructuring has gone far beyond job and route cuts – over 18 months have been spent on a radical overhaul of its corporate intranet which is expected to save the troubled company in excess of £75m ($117m) a year.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relative cultural shift from professionalism to commercialism in the accounting profession, based on an analysis of the promotional brochures used by the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec (Institute of Chartered Accountants of Québec), over the last 40 years, to attract new members.

The study's specific objectives are: to examine accountancy's cultural representations depicted in promotional brochures; to evaluate the extent to which these representations are indicative of the commercialist shift as documented in the literature; and to establish whether the representations under study provide further insight into the nature of the cultural shift. Drawing on the semiotic approach developed by Roland Barthes, the authors' analysis is predicated on the idea that promotional brochures and advertisements, though often simple in appearance, constitute complex representations that convey meaningful information about influential values and cultural change.

The authors found that commercial values are increasingly apparent through the celebration of multidisciplinary services and the emphasis on generous compensation and high dynamism.

Barthes' framework was especially useful to analyze the interplay between images and text to gain insight into the historical emergence of what has become the accountant's representation of today. As such, this study points to promotional representations participating to the inculcation of a cosmopolitan culture, where the internationalization of business is supposedly natural, inevitable, and beneficial to everyone. The authors' research also highlights the increasingly significant role played by marketing experts in designing professional institutes' brochures, consistent with the broader view of marketization as a key trend within the accounting industry.