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Outlines the framework for promoting audit in general practice, created as one part of the health service reforms. Medical Audit Advisory Groups (MAAGs) were set up in each district with the aim of participation in audit of all general practitioners by April 1992. The activities undertaken have included those recommended by the Department of Health; the most significant of these being the appointment of lay facilitators who are able to assist general practitioners and primary care teams co‐operate over efforts to improve the quality of care, and may offer one means of introducing some of the methods of total quality management into general practice. Discusses the problems which remain: audit is not yet sufficiently systematic, interface audit with secondary care is at a very early stage, the ways to involve managers and patients in audit remain to be clarified, and there is little evidence of the consequences of audit in terms of improved care. The Eli Lilly National Clinical Audit Centre has been set up within the Department of General Practice, University of Leicester, in order to address these issues.

This paper aims to explore the implications for the way organizations develop leaders when decision making is delegated closer to the front line.

The paper explores this theme using the National Trust as a case study.

Conventional distinctions between “management” and “leadership” become blurred and potentially misleading when front line managers become more accountable for local performance. In addition, a blend of interventions is required to develop skills at various leadership levels, ranging from technical to personal, and group‐based to individually tailored.

The case study is based on a charity and ignores the implications for fiduciary duties for directors and trustees. In addition, the paper does not include a review of the definition of devolved or delegated decision making. Finally, the case study is ongoing and the final results from the work will not be evident for up to two more years.

Devolving responsibility in a charity is a rare and courageous initiative, given the broad array of stakeholders and level of public scrutiny. Given this challenge, private and public sector organizations can benefit from this experience and identify ways to engage their own stakeholders in the practical leadership development implications of a similar decision.

This study aims to explore and understand a beyond budgeting-inspired initiative to abandon budgeting in a multinational bank.

Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with actors involved in and affected by the change initiative, this paper draws on Kasurinen’s accounting change framework as well as concepts from institutional theory to investigate the rationale for and the challenges of budget abandonment.

Although the improving financial market stability and the increasing accountability of banks after the global financial crisis motivated the initial organisational changes, the appointment of a head of finance with experience of beyond budgeting was a major catalyst of change. This change-promoting leader was of utmost importance in providing relevant training and support, facilitating the change initiative and overcoming the initial resistance to change. However, the remnants of former budgeting practice did not regress as intended, and the change initiative stalled.

This research contributes to beyond budgeting and accounting change studies by illustrating a stalled change initiative in the context susceptible to beyond budgeting ideas and highlighting the importance of aligning discourse and meaning with practice and routines.

There is massive interest within the financial community in ways of improving and shortcutting the arduous process of planning and budgeting. Sponsored by Accenture, researchers at Cranfield School of Management’s Centre for Business Performance reviewed the literature and interviewed 15 leading companies to obtain insights into the best practices organizations are actually adopting. While some companies have simply exorcised the term budgeting from their corporate vocabularies, a group of pioneering Scandinavian companies have dispensed with budgeting altogether.

Madan Mohanka set up Tega Industries Ltd in 1976 to manufacture abrasion-resistant rubber mill lining products used in the mining and mineral processing industries. In 2006, as part of its inorganic expansion strategy, Tega bought a mill-liner company in South Africa. Buoyed by this growth, two acquisitions were made in Australia and Chile in the year 2011. However, post-acquisition, several managerial, legal and commercial problems crept up in its manufacturing facilities in Chile, leading to financial downturn in Tega's fortunes in 2016 and compelling it to either plan a revival or divest its interest in its Chilean Plant.

This article has two main parts. First, the aim of the paper is to give a brief overview of the major developments in management control over the past 50 years and attempt to draw out some abiding themes that have arisen from the work that has been conducted. Second, it will examine one of the more recent issues in more detail, namely managing under conditions of uncertainty, and outline the contribution that management control systems research can make.

This is a conceptual paper.

The primary aim is to suggest areas for research that are likely to be both relevant and fruitful in the future. It represents a personal point of view, and is in no sense a comprehensive review of the literature, but rather attempts to draw out some important themes that are worthy of further study and development.

The paper will be of use to those seeking to design research studies in performance management.

This chapter considers the place of responsibility in confronting ecological sustainability and social equity problems in the food system. We present two illustrations addressing the following question: In what ways does responsibility present a way to close the metabolic rift in line with the vision of the global food sovereignty movement? First, using the example of Metro-Vancouver in Canada, we consider the ways in which urban people claim responsibility for land protection through the concept of urban agrarianism, defined as an urban ethic of care for foodlands, with an associated responsibility to exercise solidarity with those who cultivate and harvest food. Second, we discuss how deepening relational responsibility in legal and regulatory frameworks might hold the corporate food regime accountable in the Canadian context to address their role in and responsibility for mitigating an increasingly risky world, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the responsibility of urban people to mobilise in solidarity with food movements, and against the corporate food regime in particular, will play a critical role in supporting the transition to sustainable and just food systems. This applies both to finding new ways to claim responsibility for this transition and to hold those actors that have disproportionately benefitted from the corporate food regime responsible. Such a reworking of responsibility is especially necessary as the context for food systems change becomes increasingly urbanised and risky.

There is ample evidence that financial market development leads to economic growth. If improving labor rights can be shown to positively influence equity markets, then that, in turn, will lead to economic growth. The finance literature has examined the impact of a broader metric, namely, the Economic Freedom Index, on equity returns worldwide, and the evidence is mixed. This study focuses on one dimension of economic freedom: labor rights. Specifically, the study analyzes the impact of labor rights on national equity market indexes using the Labor Rights Index developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Fraser Institute (FI). Using panel regression analysis for 49 countries (for the OECD Index) and 76 countries (for the FI Index) over the period 1985–2014, the study finds that changes in labor rights have a statistically significant positive impact on equity returns, after controlling for business-cycle effects and time-fixed effects. The study also finds significant differences in the labor–rights–equity returns relationship between developed and less developed economies.