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‘The enlarged Community cannot afford a gentle period of gradually growing together.’

The CHEMICAL AND PETROLEUM ENGINEERING EXHIBITION opens at Olympia, London, on 18th June and will be open daily (excepting Sundays) until June 28th. We give below details of those stands that will be of special interest to our readers or which are exhibiting products which concern lubricants or lubrication.

For the majority of consumer goods businesses, brands are the engine of profit. Many companies now acknowledge the importance of their brands by including reference to their value in financial reports and, with increasing frequency balance sheets. Yet the “brands on the balance sheet” debate seems as far from resolution as ever. Brand owners wish to see universal acknowledgement of these previous assets – but accountants, whose trade is steeped in arcana, are morbidly distrustful of any attempts to value intangibles. Who is right and how far has the debate evolved? Attempts to shed light.

British technologists have eliminated the possibility of nuclear ‘leaks’ at power stations during the critical refuelling stages—using the same process that controls the mixing of the secret recipe of Coca‐Cola drinks. This particular development is a good example of the way many advances in technology hinge on a marriage of existing engineering principles, rather than the application of some new fundamental principle.

TELEVISION, that box which is the gaoler of so many minds, is essentially a neutral and inanimate thing. Its output, like that of the computer, is confined to what human brains put into it. That unoriginal thought came to us during the preview of a new series which the BBC will show to usher in the new decade, for this showed how effectively television can be employed as a serious instrument of education.

This paper analyses public sector accounting and organisation reforms, focusing on the departments in charge of defence, military procurement and war between 1850 and 2000 in Britain. Over this period, three parliamentary acts, resulting from a power struggle between the Treasury and Parliament, produced the shift between two institutional logics: probity (spending properly) and performance (spending well). The purpose of this paper is to describe how the acts produced a shift between two institutional logics.

The authors adopt Quattrone’s (2015) procedural notion of institutional logics and the consequent concept of “unfolding rationality”. Using documents from the National Archives, the authors analyse three reforms: The Exchequer and Audit Departments Act 1866 (towards probity), The Exchequer and Audit Departments Act 1921 (towards performance) and the National Audit Office Act of 1983 (towards performance and probity).

For a long time, the actors narrated in this story argued and acted as if probity and performance were incompatible. The two are now treated as compatible and equally important. Before that, the “incompatibility” was a rhetorical, or “procedural”, device. The authors argue that a procedural rather than substantive notion of institutional logics is more suitable to explain the trajectory that was the result of constant negotiation among actors.

The study might contribute to the understanding of the increase in national defence-spending at continental level and the call for a common European Union (EU) military procurement strategy that followed the invasion of Ukraine. The war could produce changes in what is a traditional tension between two logics: sovereignty or efficiency.

The originality of this paper stands in highlighting the link between the institutional logic of public-administration accounting and military history. This link emerges also thanks to a very long time-horizon. Additionally, from a theoretical viewpoint, the authors have put Quattrone’s approach to the test in a context very different from the original one (the Jesuit order).

The purpose of the this paper is to understand what is the approach adopted by accountants when they provide advisory services to family businesses (FBs) involved in a succession process.

Data for this study were collected through a questionnaire survey involving 175 Italian certified accountants. They answered questions about their experience, attitudes, behaviors and opinions toward FB succession.

Accountants are mostly concerned with technical elements and solutions (hard issues) and are less careful about relations and communication between family members (soft issues). They also underestimate the relevance of the ability to empathize with the FB owner and other family members. Despite the literature recommendations to collaborate with other advisors from a variety of backgrounds, most of the accountants work on their own or with other experts on hard issues (notaries, lawyers and bank operators). All these aspects may cause a discrepancy between FBs’ expectations and accountant’s professional practice.

Results are mainly descriptive and are limited to the perceptions and experiences of accountants interviewed.

This study offers some guidance for the accountant’s professional practice. Even if accountant’s technical skills are undoubtedly essential when addressing the main hard issues posed by succession, soft issues often represent the real problem to be managed or the most complicated one. Accountants should help less aware entrepreneurs to acquire a better knowledge of succession and to adopt a holistic approach, integrating every dimension and perspective involved. This means that succession should be tackled through an interdisciplinary approach.

The research on the role of external subjects in family succession examines, above all, the perspective of the FB. This study offers an alternative approach, adopting the accountant’s perspective to analyze his/her role and experience in the management of succession.