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The paper aims to describe the changes in buyer-supplier relationships among Japanese companies at the early 2000s, focusing on two critical features; long-term relationships and information sharing. In particular, the paper investigates the relationship between benefits from information-sharing activities within buyer-supplier relationships and the stability of these relationships.

The paper develops a questionnaire based on prior research related to Japanese companies and undertakes a questionnaire survey of 353 Japanese manufacturing companies (which belong to the machinery, electrical/electronics, transportation equipment, and precision industries) in 2002.

Although Japanese companies have been considered to have close relationships with their partners, the paper finds only a small proportion of buyers were willing to share sensitive information with their suppliers and/or expected to continue long-term relationships with them. In addition, an examination of factors relating to buyers' performance shows that receiving benefits from inter-organizational information-sharing activities (attending suppliers' meetings, sending engineers to suppliers, and proposing cost saving ideas) could affect buyers' incentives to sustain long-term relationships with their suppliers.

The paper provides empirical evidence of the changing nature of the buyer-supplier relationship in Japanese manufacturing companies. Specifically, the main contribution of this research is to provide empirical evidence indicating that the benefit from buyer-supplier relationships has an effect on the governance structure of these relationships.

This study aims to investigate the relative weight of financial and non-financial performance measures used to evaluate production managers (such as shop floor managers or foremen) in a modern manufacturing setting.

Using survey data from Japanese factories, the paper examines the association between the choice of profit, cost, and non-financial performance measures with two characteristics of manufacturing systems: interdependence and multi-tasking.

The results indicate that interdependence has a significant and positive association with the importance of profit information, while multi-tasking is associated negatively with the importance of profit information, and positively with non-financial information for performance evaluation.

In recent years, a significant shift has been observed in Japanese production management with many companies now focusing on profit information instead of cost information. For example, the past studies show that large Japanese manufacturing companies are now using micro-profit centres and include profit information when evaluating factories. However, little empirical evidence is available on performance measurement at the shop floor foreman level, and even less is known about the importance of profit information in the evaluation of these lower level managers.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the flavonoid composition and organochlorine compounds (OCs) in honey samples from different floral sources on the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, and to determine their nutritional characteristics and the risk of intaking hazardous pollutants.

Honey samples were collected from various regions of the Ryukyu Islands. Thirty-one samples were analyzed for six flavonoid compounds by high-performance liquid chromatography, and OCs from 14 samples were analyzed by gas chromatography. The differences in flavonoid composition among the samples from different floral sources were determined.

Honey from Bidens pilosa L. var. radiata Sch. Bip. contained high concentrations of luteolin and apigenin. One sample with polychlorinated biphenyls and two with chlordane compounds were detected in one region; however, their concentrations were lower than those for food regulations.

Novel chemical characteristics in Ryukyu honey, including high amounts of luteolin and apigenin from B. pilosa, were discovered, whereas low OC contamination was observed.

The JAOC has reached an important milestone. It is now 15 years old! This study aims to provide an understanding of the key achievements of the Journal.

This paper reports the findings of a bibliometric analysis of the Journal.

The Journal has made significant contributions towards understanding the various purposes or roles of accounting and the context within which it operates in diverse societies. Case studies in the Third Sector and in countries that tend to be unrepresented in many other journals, such as Laos and Vietnam, represent some of the critical contributions of papers published in the JAOC.

This paper provides a review of the Journal. Key achievements are noted along with trends in the usage of theories and topics. Gaps between the aims of the Journal and what it has achieved are also outlined.

In the current era of intensifying global competition, much attention has been focused on how companies need to change their structures and processes, or more broadly, organizational cultures, to remain competitive in this environment. Three recent studies have examined the nature of accounting firms' organizational cultures. Soeters and Schreuder (1988) and Pratt, Mohrweis and Beaulieu (1993) tested the degree to which accounting firms are able to transfer their home‐country or ganizational cultures to their foreign operations, while Pratt and Beaulieu (1992) analyzed the organizational culture of U.S. accounting firms operating in their home country. An implicit premise of these prior studies is that an accounting firm's organizational culture is an important determinant of its economic success. Thus, Pratt and Beaulieu (1992) hypothesized that organizational culture would vary with such variables as accounting firm size and functional area. Yet none of these prior studies has directly studied the nature of these firms’ external environments to which they were presumably responding. Nor have they directly measured the fit between these firms' organizational cultures and the external environment, or the effect of this fit on firm performance. The current study extends the empirical investigation to these assumed linkages. Data were collected from a sample of accounting firms operating in an important Pacific Rim participant in the global economy — Taiwan. The results are consistent with the fit between organizational culture and the environment being an important determinant of firm performance.