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The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the nature of some elements of the UK Government’s response to COVID-19 in England.

This paper is a reflective commentary based on a conceptual framing that reflects in turn on the use of performance measures in the building of trust and the author’s experience as a citizen.

The English Government approach to controlling the progress of COVID-19 has been characterised by long-standing tenets of New Public Management that have undermined rather than created trust in their actions.

Originality can be found in the application of existing understandings to the novel situation of seeking to control the COVID-19 pandemic in England.

The paper aims to categorise the nature of the research undertaken in respect of gender and accounting to identify where research is undertaken and where there remains lacunae in the field. It seeks to offer prescriptions for more research in the field and for the consideration of a particular type of research that considers the gendered values that inform accounting.

The approach taken is to provide an illustrative review of the literature in the area to demonstrate the streams of thought that are reflected in research in the field. The paper is therefore an argument for undertaking research in relation to gender more generally and more specifically pays attention to how the nature of accounting information is informed by gendered values.

The argument is that the considerations of gender in accounting research are not providing the impetus for a change that will enrich accounting information and the decision-making processes that it informs. A different approach to accounting provides the possibility of providing more equitable opportunities for those working within the accounting profession, including women.

The paper argues the case for more research in this field.

The paper has implications for the situation of women working as accountants and for a broader diversity agenda.

The paper seeks to re-emphasise an earlier paper (Broadbent, 1998) and re-energise the debates about the effects of gender in accounting. There is no other research that addresses the agenda of the gendered nature of accounting information and technologies.

There has been considerable interest in the theory and practice of organisation change. Similarly there has been a great deal of attention given to the processes that lead to and result from accounting change within organisations. There has also been a more limited interest in the interaction and interrelationship between these two literatures. In this paper we explore these different literatures and provide a perspective on this extensive research. The contents are not intended to be a systematic summary of this voluminous literature but rather a recounting of our own views on how we have engaged with this material, as a precursor to thoughts on a future research agenda for these important issues. The paper starts by posing four questions related to organisational and accounting change, the answers to which circumscribe how these themes can be approached theoretically and empirically. Based on our answers to these questions we then move into perspectives on understanding organisations, understanding organisational change and understanding accounting change within an organisational change context. From this analysis the paper concludes with some suggestions on a possible future research agenda on these important organisational issues.

The purpose of this paper is to engage a different notion of feminism in accounting by addressing the issues of feminism, balance, and integration as a means of understanding differently the world for which one accounts. The ideas are communicated by the sharing of experiences through myth and storytelling.

An alternative lens for understanding the giving of accounts is proposed, drawing on earlier feminist accounting literature as well as storytelling and myth.

Including the subjective and intersubjective approaches to experiencing and understanding the world recommends an approach whereby both the feminine‐intuitive and the masculine‐rational processes are integrated in constructing decision models and accounts.

Through an expanded view of values that can be included in reporting or recounting a different model is seen, and different decisions are enabled. The primary limitation is having to use words to convey one's subjective and intersubjective understandings. The written medium is not the most natural language for such an undertaking.

By enabling the inclusion of more feminine values, a way is opened to engage more holistically with the society in which decisions are embedded.

Drawing on the storytelling tradition, a holistic model is suggested that can lead to emergence of a more balanced societal reporting.

The “new public management” (NPM) “reforms” have been extensive in the public sector in the UK. The paper’s primary focus is on the managerial and organizational effects of these accounting and finance‐led changes in the specific context of schools and GP practices. Central to the paper’s analysis and conclusion is the way that, in both these areas, many of the changes are perceived as unhelpful, intrusive and potentially dangerous for the nature of the core activities and values which underlie these organizations. The organizational effect of this dominant attitude is to develop appropriate “absorbing” mechanisms to “manage” these changing “disturbances” so that core activities and values remain unaffected. The paper develops, in two ways, the published analyses of these absorption processes: first, by providing a comparison over time of these absorption processes in schools and GP practices using a wider data set and second, by extending the analysis to show how these processes change as the nature of the “disturbances” shift and develop over time. The paper ends with a call for a wide‐ranging evaluation of the merit and worth of these “reforms” both generally and in the specific context of schools and GP practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the management control systems developed by universities and groups within them, to manage research within UK University Business and Management Schools. Specifically, the paper analyses how universities develop their internal management control systems in response to an externally imposed regulatory system. It also provides an agenda for future research.

The paper uses a middle range approach to consider the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) and the previous Research Assessment Exercises. It uses the language provided by a number of conceptual frames to analyse insights from the lived experience, and builds on previous literature that has recognised the perverse outcomes of such performance measurement systems.

The study finds that the internal management control systems developed by academics themselves amplify the controls imposed by the REF. These internal control systems are accepted by some academics although they encourage a movement away from previously held academic values.

This study contributes to debates about the dysfunctional impacts of the use of performance measures to manage research. Its originality lies in explaining that the management control systems developed to resist the imposition of external performance measurement systems may lead to symbolic violence where participants become involved with their own subjugation.

The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the field of public sector accounting research. Many nation states deliver essential public services. In recent times, many of these nations have been involved in programmes of “modernisation”, which, in part, means that these public services now are significantly managed, delivered and governed by private and third sector organisations.

The paper employs a literature‐based analysis and critique of public sector accounting articles published in the selected journals from 1992 to 2006. From this, a descriptive meta‐analysis of the characteristics of the research will be discussed. Finally, a conceptual analysis of the selected literature will be used to evaluate the field and address a possible future research agenda.

The descriptive analysis highlights that among the research papers reviewed several interesting patterns emerged concerning public service research. Also, the dominance of Australasia and UK research was noted. The extent of research in different levels of government/jurisdiction indicated that the majority of research was organisationally based. Finally, when the various functional types of accounting are considered, management accounting remained the most researched area of interest.

The paper only considered research within eight selected journals and over the period 1992 to 2006. Therefore, for instance, US mainstream public sector accounting research has not been reviewed.

The main implications of the paper are that “contextual” public service accounting research has a strong tradition and, through the process of reflection and critique of the body of work, several important insights are provided in order to highlight areas for further research and policy development.

The purpose of this paper is to set out some contextual issues in relation to the achievements of women accountants and academics.

This is a discussion paper that uses academic and professional experiences as a basis from which to draw out an agenda for further study.

It is found that, despite changes over the last 30 years, the lived experience of women in accounting and academia is evidence that their academic and professional opportunities are still constrained. Two papers in this special issue offer feminist approaches to enrich study in the area, and it is argued that gender is an element that should be embedded in research in accounting.

This editorial is a selective review and is not intended as a comprehensive review of research in the field.

The paper seeks to re‐ignite more research in the field, using a richer range of approaches.

The paper sets an agenda for research and provides an argument as to why the agenda needs to be pursued.

Public private partnerships (PPPs) are a recent extension of what has now become well known as the “new public management” agenda for changes in the way public services are provided. PPPs involve organisations whose affiliations lie in respectively the public and private sectors working together in partnership to provide public services. This special issue of the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal explores this new development, which, in its most advanced form, is contained in the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) but is now spreading across the world in multiple forms. This introduction provides an overview of this development as well as an outline of the seven papers that make up this special issue. These seven papers are divided into two parts – the first four looking at different aspects of PFI and the latter three providing three country‐based (from the USA, New Zealand and Australia) studies of PFI/PPP. Many questions about the nature, regulation, pre‐decision analysis and post‐project evaluation are addressed in these papers but many research questions remain unanswered, as this Introduction makes plain.

This paper explores the resistance strategies of organisations to unwanted changes. It is concerned with the way satellite organisations are created to provide a counter force to environmental disturbances such as changes introduced in the context of what has come to be called New Public Management. Its particular focus is with the attempt to develop and institutionalize external, “public” forms of resistance rather than undertake more internal, “private” forms. The specific empirical focus is general medical practice in the UK, where commissioning groups were formed as an alternative to GP fundholding. To help analyse this empirical detail we draw insights from Habermas’s model of society, organisational change theory and institutional theory. In the process the paper not only amplifies the empirical reactions of GP practices in the UK but also uses this empirical detail to develop the nature of this theoretical base by adding new dimensions concerning organisational resistance.