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The historian can provide quite a different explanation, other than the currently held views, for the emergence of the Red Terror in 1918.

This is the second of a two‐part article on cultural aspects of alcohol use. Part I introduced the primary and secondary characteristics of culture and the current information on drinking patterns of selected ethnocultural groups. Part 2 includes other selected primary and secondary characteristics of culture such as age, gender, religious affiliation, education, socioeconomic status, and sexual orientation. The article concludes with measures whose effectiveness has been questionable in promoting responsible alcohol use and includes some proven and new recommendations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the new alcohol debate and put it into historical perspective, before outlining the meaning and nature of the new temperance challenge.

A moral perspective on the patterns of alcohol consumption from the point of view of character virtue is offered in order to address this deep‐seated cultural problem.

Facts and figures on the nature and extent of Britain's alcohol problem are used to illustrate the strength of present day concerns.

The acquisition of temperance in today's society is very difficult in the face of affluence and a consumer culture, which encourages impulsiveness and infantilisation especially when it comes to drinking alcohol. The particular problems of the UK are exacerbated by cultural factors and patterns of family structure, which also undermine the acquiring of the virtue of temperance.

Today's drink problem is a problem of character that has to be tackled by all the institutions of civil society, the family, religious groups, and communities. The drinks industry in its widest sense can also play its part in developing a culture of temperance.

The contention of the paper is that unless the cultivation of some notion of temperance is reverted as a shared virtue of character, today's alcohol problem will not successfully be tackled.

Society and government policy currently demonstrate contradictory tendencies in relation to alcohol. Government policy promotes longer opening hours, but also more stringent control of public drinking through ASBOs and alcohol dispersal zones. Young people favour heavy drinking and the ‘night time economy’, while older generations oppose the extension of pub opening hours. The media debates rationing treatment for those with self‐inflicted disease, but portrays national mourning at George Best's death. In an attempt to learn from the efforts of the past, Virginia Berridge uncovers the strikingly familiar world of temperance and ponders whether we are perhaps at a ‘tipping point’ in culture in relation to alcohol?

This paper seeks to extend the development of the historical accounting research agenda further into the area of popular culture. The work examines the discourses that surrounded the drinking of alcohol in nineteenth century Britain and explores how an accounting failure disrupted the tension between the two established competing discourses, leading to a significant impact on UK drinking culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

The paper employs both primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources are used to develop the main themes of the discourses deployed by the temperance societies and the whisky companies. Primary sources derived from the contemporary press are employed, as necessary, in support.

The paper demonstrates that accounting, although it may not be central to a discourse or other social structure, can still have a profound impact upon cultural practices. The potential for research into culture and accounting should not therefore be dismissed if no immediate or concrete relationship between culture and accounting can be determined. Further support is provided for studies that seek to expand the accounting research agenda into new territories.

The study of popular culture is relatively novel in accounting research. This paper seeks to add to this research by exploring an area of cultural activity that has hitherto been neglected by researchers, i.e. by exploring how an accounting incident impacted upon the historical consumption of Scotch whisky in the UK.

White‐collar trade unionism has aroused considerable interest among students of industrial relations, but relatively little attention has been paid to staff associations, which Crompton noted perform similar functions to trade unions and to which white‐collar workers are partial. At present, white‐collar and partly white‐collar unions account for roughly half of the unions in Britain and some 35 per cent of the membership. The density of white‐collar membership has increased to 40 per cent (over 50 per cent if staff and professional associations are included), compared with 53 per cent for manual workers. White‐collar workers are traditionally thought to be less disposed to join trade unions and, as Bain et al note, “when white collar workers do unionize, they are believed to carry with them certain aspects of the status ideology which affects the behaviour of their unions”. Blackburn and Prandy offer a theoretical framework which may be used to compare the “unionateness” of white‐collar and manual forms of employee representation. Most white‐collar unions satisfy the criteria of unionateness, but a large proportion of staff associations fail on the question of independence from employers for the purposes of negotiation. In the first four years of his appointment, the Certification Officer refused certificates of independence to fifty‐one organisations, all of them staff associations.

Civil society in Sri Lanka has, to a large extent, been shaped by British colonial rule and the establishment of the modern, democratic state in the first half of the 20th century. In pre-colonial times, grass roots communities organised around the need for collective work in temples and for irrigation. A notion of pre-colonial cooperation and harmony and an ideal traditional Buddhist society, which was lost due to colonialism and modernisation and should be revived, today forms part of the Sinhalese nationalist discourse and of the mobilisation rationale of the large community development organisation Sarvodaya (see Gombrich & Obeysekere, 1988; Brow, 1990).

This paper offers a critique of the sacred and secular dichotomy, a theoretical framework recently introduced into the accounting and accountability literature primarily by Laughlin and Booth. The divide has been used to interpret the ambiguous roles of accountants and accounting practices within religious organizations.

The present paper examines the divide by drawing on H. Richard Niebuhr's narrative theology, and in particular, the distinction that he draws between “internal history” and “external history”. Niebuhr's discussion of internal/external history and his typology of social action are used to demonstrate the many ways that religious communities balance faith and social practice.

The paper argues that the activities and contributions of accountants and accounting practices are not by virtue of their secularity antithetical to the values of religious organizations. It contends that within many religious settings, secular activities, such as accounting, often co‐exist, promote and are used to support religious beliefs and practices.

The paper challenges the dominant paradigm by highlighting the importance of adopting flexible theoretical frameworks.

It will be of value to accounting and accountability researchers who are seeking to gain a better understanding of the fit between accounting practices and the internal histories of religions.