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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect that a regime of mandatory audit firm rotation would have on audit quality.

Using two measures of audit quality, being the propensity to issue a going‐concern report and the level of discretionary accruals, the paper examines the switching patterns of clients in their current voluntary switching capacity, and the levels of audit quality.

The main finding is that audit quality increases with audit firm tenure, when proxied by the propensity to issue a going‐concern opinion, and is unaffected when proxied by the level of discretionary expenses. Given the additional costs associated with switching auditors, it is concluded that there are minimal, if any, benefits of mandatory audit firm rotation.

A limitation of this study is that only actual audit quality is examined. While the results suggest that actual audit quality is associated with the length of audit tenure, the perception of audit quality is not addressed, which may increase with audit firm rotation.

The results go against the move towards mandatory audit firm rotation, and suggest that other initiatives may need to be considered to address concerns about auditor independence and audit quality.

THE occasional moving of stock in open‐shelf libraries creates a sense of novelty in the reader. We experienced this recently in entering a library familiar to us where we found the Literature section had been moved and reduced in order to make space for the increase in the Applied Arts class. Further the librarian declared that there was no excessive demand for much of modern poetry, but although the library has the poems of T. S. Eliot in several copies, none was on the shelves or at the moment available. One wonders if poetry that is “modern” has been read by the majority in the past half‐century; it is an art form, often lacking substance and therefore caviare to the ordinary reader. The poets of today with such exceptions as Walter de la Mare and Alfred Noyes, neither of whom is young, have not increased their chances by their deliberate or unconscious obscurity. Even the said‐to‐be most influential of the modern, T. S. Eliot, in such a work as Ash Wednesday, topical this month of course, is completely unintelligible, in spite of the almost divine music of some of its lines, to many quite intelligent and habitual readers. Our librarian declared that readers remain for Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning and even for Longfellow, in short for the real classics. This conclusion is borne out by the examination of a day's borrowings a year ago at Manchester. “Modern poetry,” its Report tells us, “seems to be departing from the range of the general reader into some esoteric mystery of its own,” and while the older classics, Browning, Chaucer, Donne and Tennyson were borrowed to the extent of four copies each, other poets were less in demand. Altogether 21 works of individual poets and 16 anthologies went out that day. A small array but, if continued through the year, it meant 11,100 works which are not a negligible number.

Based on the proceedings of a conference organised by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Chicago, 1999. The Editors demonstrate, through contributions from business historians and economists, that “advanced research” has superceded the neo‐classical theory of the firm.

Looks at the development of mail order trading in the UK and the USA, showing that there are substantial differences. Uses tables to give emphasis to the growth of UK mail order and follows this up with a similar study of the USA. Confirms that it is difficult to forecast the future of total sales through the medium of mail order, that it is unlikely that it will not pick up relative share, but that its growth rate will probably slow down. Sums up that there is certainly room for expansion in this market.

In a recent reference to changes brought about by the local government reorganisation of 1974, we criticised some of the names given to the new areas. Some of these name changes have made difficulties for those who follow from afar the doings of local authorities, as well as raising the ire of local people. Local names, however, are not the only casualty. The creation of new and larger governmental organisations rarely, if ever, results in economy and as anticipated, it was not long before the new local authorities were being directed to embrace financial stringency and all that it incurs. One such other casualty has been the loss of so many of the annual reports of local authority departments, very few now arriving at BFJ offices. In every case, the reason has been the same—severe restrictions on spending. Not that this was not necessary in many fields, but in respect of annual reports, we are convinced it was false economy. For so many of the reports, it was our pleasure to review them in the pages of BFJ. A prominent Labour politician was once heard to refer to them as “hard and dry reports for hard and dry officials”. It all depends probably on what you are looking for in them. Statistics there must be but most enforcement officers and public analysts, endeavour to keep these to the minimum, the general impression being that these are “dry”. If you are looking for trends, for comparison of the year under review with preceding years and then for comparing the results reported in one part of the country with another, where the population, eating habits, consumer reactions may be different, the tables of statistics are highly important.

Although the topic of span of control (SOC) has been discussed in detail in management literature and education, less focus has been placed on the decline research since the 1970s and, thus, the future relevance of the concept. By providing a historical overview of the literature on SOC through the work of key management scholars, this paper aims to explain why the literatures’ coverage of the topic has been significantly diminished in recent decades and offers suggestions as to why further research on the topic is needed.

The authors provide a historical literature review and analysis on the decline of SOC as a construct of interest.

The findings of the paper include a brief analysis of SOC. The concept was a very strong concept that declined as management became more scientific, rejecting classical management theory. This rejection occurred because SOC was impacted by multiple factors making it impossible to effectively study, making it imprecise. Likewise, SOC is too applied and lacked theoretical relevance. However, SOC still has value, especially when paired with a theory such as leader-member-exchange (LMX).

The authors argue that SOC is still relevant today and management scholars should align its study with its practice in modern organizational structures. However, its focus needs to change and be added to other theories such as LMX.

Three major US corporations have joined forces to establish a new videotex venture. The companies involved are CBS, IBM and retailers Sears Roebuck. The partners have not yet outlined the type of service they will be offering, but have said that it will be aimed at households with home and personal computers. It will be available to a variety of advertisers, retailers, publishers and Financial services providers.

We review research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) published in 13 top accounting journals over the last decade. We begin with a brief discussion of the data that archival researchers have used to measure CSR. Next, we conduct our review in four parts: (1) determinants of CSR; (2) the relation between CSR and financial performance; (3) consequences of CSR; and (4) the roles of CSR disclosure and assurance. We summarize the accounting literature in these areas and comment on how accounting researchers can use their skill sets with regard to specific issues. Within each area, we present some suggestions for future CSR research in accounting.

This paper presents Stanford Research Institute's approach to corporate planning and illustrates how it can be applied to international business. Planning is only now beginning to emerge from the status of being an art and to develop into some kind of science. We at the Institute have been in the corporate planning research business for some seven or eight years now, and the approach we take is constantly being modified and improved on. Our format is flexible. It is in reality a philosophy, a basis of logic, that underlies the physical tasks in the planning process, and these tasks vary with the individual company. A rigorous basis of logic is not a mechanical stifler of creativity; rather it is a means of capitalizing on it.

A classification scheme by its notation does not do more than locate the subject; therefore, after the books are classified according to the scheme adopted, a secondary arrangement must be provided for the shelves, whereby books in a given class may be arranged in some order to accelerate finding and to differentiate one book from another. There are several methods in vogue of so arranging books in a given class, but one's choice will be, to some extent, determined by the System of issue in use. The usual methods are by:—