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A new regulatory regime for issuing, and enforcing compliance with, accounting standards has been established in the UK. It includes an enforcement body, the Financial Reporting Review Panel (FRRP), which is responsible for examining alleged departures from the Companies Act and accounting standards by companies. The FRRP has secured revisions in company accounts which were regarded as defective, and has issued press notices summarising the defects and the remedial action taken. The FRRP was intended to strengthen auditors in their negotiations with directors, but there are tensions in the relationship as the majority of companies receiving a press notice had unqualified audit reports. The FRRP has reported auditors to their professional body, but no action has been taken against any auditors to date.

The paper aims to examine the role, funding and status of Network Rail, a very significant example of New Labour's attempt to operationalise the “third way”. The analysis of Network Rail is used to critique the “third way” approach to policy‐making in Britain.

The paper examines Network Rail, and the significant changes that have occurred since its creation, in the context of the claims originally made for the company by Transport Secretary Byers. It employs critical financial analysis and non‐financial performance indicators to examine the “third way” approach to rail privatisation, drawing on the work of its leading supporter in the UK, Giddens, and its leading critic, Callinicos.

The paper demonstrates that Network Rail is an expensive mechanism for channelling public money to private companies. It argues that the “third way” is really a smoke screen for the neo‐liberal ideology, behind which there is a continuing transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the private sector.

The paper focuses on one significant example of the “third way” approach to policy making. It demonstrates the strength of the neo‐liberal ideology, particularly the belief in the value of privatisation, in the UK.

The findings of the paper have implications for public policy and for those affected by rail privatisation, including employees, passengers and taxpayers.

Researchers and practitioners working in the area of public sector management and reforms should find the paper of value.

The purpose of this paper is to contest Edwards et al.’s (2002) findings that resistance to the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and the form that it took when implemented by the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of ideological conflict between the privileged landed aristocracy and the rising merchant middle class.

The study draws upon a collection of documents preserved as part of the Grigg Family Papers located in London and the Thomson Papers held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. It also draws on evidence contained within the British National Archive, the National Maritime Museum and British Parliamentary Papers which has been overlooked by previous studies of the introduction of DEB.

Conflict and delays in the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping were not primarily the product of “ideological” differences between the influential classes. Instead, this study finds that conflict was the result of a complex amalgam of class interests, ideology, personal antipathy, professional intolerance and ambition. Newly discovered evidence recognises the critical, largely forgotten, work of John Deas Thomson in developing a double-entry bookkeeping system for the Royal Navy and the importance of Sir James Graham’s determination that matters of economy would be emphasised in the Navy’s accounting.

This study establishes that crucial to the ultimate implementation of double-entry bookkeeping was the passionate, determined support of influential champions with strong liberal beliefs, most especially John Deas Thomson and Sir James Graham. Prominence was given to economy in government.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the varied concerns of delegates at an international accounting conference.

The methodology takes the form of a prose article and accompanying fictional poem.

Accounting conferences gather many different voices and points of view, but with a degree of commonality in themes.

The paper encourages the use of creative expression to represent areas of research and enquiry.

A review of some of the proceedings of a major conference is structured in a novel manner, combining the use of the cento (a composite, “found” poem) with prose.

In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1996) offers one version of an argument frequently repeated in the history of law-and-literature scholarship; to wit, that the literary imagination performs a salutary function with regard to many domains of modern public life. While law and economics are governed by logics of bureaucratic rationality and utilitarian calculus, literature, in particular the novel, presents a counterdiscourse, inviting us to empathize with others, expanding our moral sense, emphasizing the importance of affect and imagination in the making of a just, humane, and democratic society. Nussbaum's broad goal is a commendable one; concerned that “cruder forms of economic utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis that are…used in many areas of public policy-making and are frequently recommended as normative for others” are, in effect, dehumanizing, she argues for the importance to public life of “the sort of feeling and imagining called into being” by the experience of reading literary texts (1996, p. 3). This sort of feeling and imagining, Nussbaum explains, fosters sympathetic understanding of others who may be quite different from us and a deepened awareness of human suffering.

The starting point for the paper is an assessment of the impact of a 1993 special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, which provided an interdisciplinary analysis of the pursuit of accountable management reforms in the UK public sector. From this assessment, the paper offers a set of reflections on the development over the last two decades of “new” public management practice and research, and also indicates some of the obligations and responsibilities of academic researchers and managers alike in the context of a continuing appetite for such reforms.

The paper is written in a reflective fashion, including assessments of: our role as guest editors of the special issue; the continuing pertinence of key messages emanating from the special issue; and broader considerations drawn from our own working experience in managerial roles in universities and personal reflections on the state of the public management literature.

The paper highlights the long‐standing litany of failure attached to such public management reform movements, as well as the limited degree of cross‐disciplinary learning within the field. The paper emphasises that we need to rethink the parameters of “public sector” (accounting) research, and avoid the partitioning of (accounting) research into ever smaller and self‐referential sub‐areas. We need more cross‐national studies. We need to know more about which management practices travel readily, and which travel less easily, and what happens when implementation is problematic. We need also to reinforce the importance of historical analyses, if we are to derive the most benefit from studies of the interrelations among accounting and public management reforms and wider transformations in ways of governing economic and social life. Finally, we need to retain or reinstate curiosity at the heart of our concerns, in order to dispel the self‐evidence or taken‐for‐grantedness of so much of our present.

Personal reflections, while being beneficially close to the subject under consideration, inevitably suffer from claims of bias and a lack of independence. We have sought to control for such risks by drawing on a variety of sources of information with respect to impact, including (albeit ironically) citation counts and an analysis of the writings of individual authors contributing to the special issue.

The paper is novel in that it seeks to combine an analysis of the literature on public sector accounting and management reforms over several decades with our own, multi‐faceted, engagement with public management research and practice.

Few regret the passing of an old year, with its darkening days and cold nights, its message fading as the voice weakens. A new year always looks more attractive with hopes of better things to come, but an occasional look back over one's shoulder, as it were, is seldom completely without profit, for experience can sometimes be more potent than hope. 1968 seemed to have more than its share of uncertainties, tragedies and disasters, in this country and in the world at large. An unsure economic state, to say nothing of monetary confusion, was reflected in every field of industry and public administration, but in the field of food quality and purity control, steady progress towards a comprehensive system of food standards, of hygiene and of food additive control was maintained. In fact, the year may be seen as not an entirely unfruitful one, with one or two events which may well prove to be landmarks.

‘EVERY patron of a public library is an individual endowed with free choice. But to what extent is the public library acting as an effective neutraliser of individuality?’