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Accounting research has struggled with how ethnicity is to be understood in relation to concepts such as nation and nationality and how ethnicity may impact on accounting and auditing practices, behaviours, education and professional values. These themes are explored and developed in the papers presented in this special issue. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore the contrasting theoretical and methodological approaches reflected by the papers in the issue.

This is a reflective and analytical paper which explores how notions of ethnicity are conceived and operationalised in accounting research. The authors identified two distinctive analytic ordering processes evident within this AAAJ Special issue: Mary Douglas’ scheme of Grid and Group and the Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, capital and habitus.

The “Grid and Group” Culture Theory with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools evident in the papers provide powerful tools to explore the relationship between ethnicity and accounting both conceptually and empirically, suggesting that ethnicity can be deployed to reveal and challenge institutionalised racism. This paper highlights the potential to integrate elements of the “Grid and Group” Culture Theory and Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. The issue of ethnicity and the relationship between ethnicity and accounting should be more fruitfully explored in future.

The authors acknowledge the challenges and limitations of discussing the issue of ethnicity from any particular cultural perspective and recognise the implicit dominance of White Anglo centric perspectives within accounting research.

The papers presented in the special issue illustrate that the issue of ethnicity is complex and difficult to operationalise. This paper highlights the potential to move beyond the ad hoc application of theoretical and methodological concepts to operationalise coherent concepts which challenge and extend the authors’ understanding of accounting as a social and contextual practice. But to achieve this it is necessary to more clearly integrate theory, methodology, method and critique.

Hundreds of Jordanian traditional villages are facing the serious risk of being demolished due to the shortage of basic public services and their resulting abandoned state. Important occurrences of vernacular architecture in these villages necessitate a national strategy to conserve the tangible and intangible heritage they offer, despite the economic difficulties that impede the local community in their efforts to protect or rehabilitate their long-established habitat and traditions. The case of Dana is a relevant example of these villages that are abandoned in spite of their considerable human and material potentialities. Therefore, analyses of place-oriented conceptual meaning, which affect man's belonging to the place, and building typologies are developed in order to comprehend the traditional spatial composition and the interrogatives of conserving the original habitat for tourism purposes. Appropriate scenarios of administrative and technical approaches could better offer the local communities the conservation of memories, place identity and sustainable economic development, hopefully extendible to other situations in traditional villages.

THIS number of THE LIBRARY WORLD returns to the question of foreign literature in British Libraries. The insistence in recent years upon two foreign languages at least, as a qualification for a librarian, has had some good results; but they are Still inadequate in extent. Every librarian must be painfully aware of the handicap we British people suffer in our average inability to converse in any language but our own; no other race is quite so restricted. A Swiss, for example, does not ask if we can speak this or that language, but asks, “In what language shall we speak together?”—a vastly different thing. It is not because of any lack of power to learn; it is merely our unwillingness or lack of opportunity to do so. Such attitudes are anachronisms to‐day; peoples get so much closer every hour, and it must be clear to all who think that one place in a town where a foreigner should be able to ask an intelligent question and receive an answer in his own tongue is the library.