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In this paper, the author of the Auditor's Dictionary: Terms, Concepts, Processes, and Regulations reflects on the challenges and implications of dictionary‐writing. The paper takes the form of a discursive literary review. Preparation of the Auditor's Dictionary offered insights into contentious aspects of lexicography, ranging from definitions of the term “dictionary” to the subjective nature of lexical selection. The Auditor's Dictionary also illuminated a number of characteristics of auditing, including the nature of auditing's intellectual foundations; its rather loose lexicon; its increasing self‐assertion as a field independent of accounting; and the discipline's social status and credibility. The traditional subsuming of the auditing lexicon within accounting dictionaries has reflected the historical origins of auditing within accounting, but it does not reflect the increasingly independent status of auditing as a standalone discipline. The Auditor's Dictionary may assist in reinforcing the conceptual peg on which the language of auditing rests. In addition, dictionaries often act as more than information providers – they frequently take on the role of cultural artefact or ideological instrument. The existence of a dictionary for a field of activity can be a signal of status and credibility, and the Auditor's Dictionary may have potential repercussions for the intellectual and professional status of auditing.

This paper seeks to provide a summary and explanation of the legal aspects of recent changes to the UK retirement law.

The paper provides background to the concept of retirement in the context of the recent abolition of the default retirement age in the UK. The paper looks at key changes to the UK retirement law and the subsequent implications for employers.

The question of how to deal with older members of staff, particularly those who have worked for a business for a long time, is often a difficult one for managers. In the UK, at present, employers must follow a fairly strict retirement process that penalises them for failing to comply, but which does allow them to choose to retire an employee without the employee having any say in the matter. From 1 October 2011, it will be age discrimination to dismiss someone by reason of retirement and this will have implications for businesses that employ staff.

The abolition of the default retirement age has the potential to have a large impact on businesses, creating difficulties but also potential opportunities.

Reviews the success of the Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) in enhancing the professional status of both the discipline of internal auditing and the IIA itself. The IIA has established the paraphernalia of a formal professional framework but several factors appear to hold back the professional “project”, the most important of which is the absence of monopolistic control over the discipline. The IIA faces two options for the future. It may wish to proceed further along the path of creating a formal professional framework. Alternatively, the IIA in its current form may be ideally positioned for a new, post‐professional world for which traditional, antiquated professional institutions seem ill equipped.

Changes in Eastern Europe raise two sorts of questions: What is the relation between political, economic and moral autonomy? And is the economic system basic in that a change in it will bring about the necessary reforms, or does change depend on political or legal reform? One can abolish central planning and not create systems prey to the objection that market economies turn labour into a commodity, exclude too many people from effective participation in the system, and threaten the world through their endless expansion? It is argued that legal systems provide basic and necessary conditions which exert a profound influence on the shape of economic systems, that failure of legality in the Soviet Union made economic disaster inevitable, and that the rise of capitalism itself depended on legal forms. Some ideas of property and legality in early modern European thought are explored. Francisco Suárez grounded claims to freedom on the fact that each of us possesses a will before we ever come into contact with the law. We therefore have a right to freedom which is more fundamental than any system. But Suárez limited intrusions on freedom to the promulgated laws of a bona fide juridical community. He thus helped shape notions of private property. By developing such notions we may see how an economy can be efficient without doing violence to morality.

Recent market volatility has provided a fundamental challenge to those arguing for the central role of intellectual capital as a source of organisation value. Using perceptual data relevant to the importance of intellectual capital as a source of enterprise value gathered in two studies conducted before and after the recent market ‘downturn’ respectively, this paper provides empirical evidence in support of the continuing and central importance of intellectual capital. The findings from these two studies also demonstrate consistency in the composition of the human, internal and external components of intellectual capital. The Irish software/telecom sector provides an ideal research frame work for any such investigation. In recent years Ireland has established itself as the largest software exporter in the world and this sector has been one of the primary engines of growth in an economy that has experienced real growth of over 40% in 6 years, a rate unparalleled in the developed world.