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The results of recent surveys of businesses indicate that cash flow is the single most important problem they face. The business press has noted that “cash‐flow planning is one of the more difficult and vulnerable areas in business management,” and that “businessmen can't understand why…they [are] running out of cash.” In fact, it's safe to suggest for companies of any size that cash is the lifeblood of the firm, and that a company's cash‐planning practices can be a critical early warning device of impending financial trouble.

Too often companies using a manufacturing strategy of mass production have been hard hit by competition from inexpensively produced imports. But many companies that do remain competitive are developing a flexible specialization strategy. This strategy allows them to be more entrepreneurial in their manufacturing approach by both accommodating and creating rapid market changes.

This case challenges students to apply financial reporting concepts pertaining, most notably, to liabilities and expenses in a specific corporate situation. In the context of an interesting, but noncomplex, technical accounting issue, students debate the best way for Adenosine Therapeutics to present its compensation arrangements in its financial statements. In addition, this case also prompts students to debate the best way for a growing company, with cash constraints, to provide incentive and maintain top employees.

This paper aims to extend an earlier analysis of the profitability of an individual firm operating in the professional services industry from the perspective of the triple‐entry framework of the momentum accounting theory of Yuji Ijiri.

The paper presents a “common‐size‐format” model of balance‐sheet momentum, an approach typical of financial statements' mathematical analysis.

Common‐size‐format momentum ratios offer an alternative measurement of (the change of) business performance. They model stabilizing phenomena that might develop very differently from ratios like return on total assets or return on equity and thus provide important informational signals to the analyst of financial statements. The common‐size‐format ratio of net wealth momentum herein discussed is proposed as a supplemental measurement for business performance analysis.

The paper discusses a new method for performance measurement and risk analysis.

The classics will circulate wrote a public librarian several years ago. She found that new, attractive, prominently displayed editions of literary classics would indeed find a substantial audience among public library patrons.

Our purpose in this paper is three‐fold. First, we shall briefly describe what is almost a truism— that is, the classical (especially the Greek) intellectual heritage of the Arab‐Islamic scholars upon which the latter, imbued by their young faith, developed their own comprehensive synthesis. Second, as part of that synthesis, we shall explore briefly the economic thought of a few early‐medieval Arab‐Islamic scholastics who extended that heritage and wrote on numerous issues of human concern, including economics. Those discourses took place during what is sometimes called the “golden age” of Islam — a period that coincided roughly with the so‐called Dark Age of Europe. Parenthetically, it might be noted that one of 20th century's most prominent economists, the late Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) had, unfortunately for the continuity and evolution of human intellectual tradition, declared that period as “the Great Gap,” representing “blank centuries,” during which nothing of significance to economics, or for that matter to any field, was said or written anywhere — as though there was a complete lacuna over intellectual evolution throughout the rest of the world (Schumpeter, 52, 74; see Ghazanfar, 1991). And finally, we will provide some evidence as to the historically influential linkages of the Arab‐Islamic thought, including economic thought, with the Latin‐European scholastics‐a phenomenon that facilitated the European intellectual evolution. An underlying theme of this paper is predicated on the premise that the classical tradition (i.e., Greek knowledge, though not exclusively) is part of a long historical continuum that represents the inextricably linked Judeo‐Christian‐and‐Islamic tradition of the West. This theme, though not common appreciated, is amply corroborated through the writings of well‐known scholars from the East and the West (see, for example, Durant, Haskins, Myers, O'Leary, Said, Sarton, Sharif, and others).

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of the sociological model of professionalisation known as the “professional project” put forward by Magali Larson, which has become the prevailing paradigm for accounting historians.

The paper challenges the use of the concepts of monopoly, social closure, collective social mobility and the quest for status as applied to the history of accountancy. The arguments are made on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

The use of the concept of monopoly is not justified in the case of accounting societies or firms. The only monopoly the accountants required was the exclusive right to the titles, for example, CA in Britain and CPA in the USA. They were right to argue that the credentials were merely to distinguish themselves in the market place from untrained accountants. The validity of the concept of social closure via artificial barriers to entry is questioned and new evidence is provided that the elite accountants have always recruited heavily from classes lower in the social hierarchy than themselves. The concept of the collective social mobility project is found wanting on a priori and empirical grounds; accountants behaved no differently to other business classes and have probably not enhanced their social status since the formation of their societies.

The paper offers, in the case of accountancy, one of the few critiques of the accepted model of professionalisation. It demonstrates the weak explanatory power of the sociological paradigms used by accounting historians.