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The purpose of this paper is to theorize the social role of management systems and their political connections using ANTi-History. In so doing, it engages with academic conversations around the writing of business history. The paper focuses on subjective experience in the context of colonial privateers and the vice-admiralty court in the Napoleonic Wars era.

ANTi-History is proposed as a theoretical lens to examine the entrepreneurial work of privateers. ANTi-History destabilizes the idea of history as a dominant account of the past and is interested in controversies as to how history is produced. This paper also brings-in Bourdieu’s notion of officialization because historical knowledge is situated in official practices that conceal translations and political strategies that enable actor-networks to act as one.

The controls of the vice-admiralty court not only perpetuated the inherited British class system, but also created versions of reality that came to be accepted as recorded history. This shows that the rules and regulations of the court were not neutral accounting activities. The systems constituted the identity of actors and produced privateer history as a modernist knowledge of the past and officialized by western, white, male, elites.

The “historic turn” in management and organization studies has not been fully realized more than a decade after its introduction. This paper engages with the historic turn by providing a specific exemplar of history as applied to officialized accounts of colonial privateers. Using ANTi-History as a methodological approach also makes a contribution by promoting it beyond a prolonged descriptive phase.

Culture has important influence on accounting and disclosure practices. This paper furthers this cultural research and accounting classification schemes in general. To examine the relationship between culture and accounting models, hypothesized cultural pairings of countries within Asia are constructed and tested by rank‐wise comparisons of observed accounting and reporting practices with all possible pairs. The analysis provides confirmation of relationships for two of the six hypothesized pairs using three approaches. There appears to be a high correspondence in the accounting practices within certain pairs of Asian countries sharing common cultural origins. Further, through exploratory Q‐factor analysis and cluster analysis, groupings of countries within Asia are identified, on the basis of observed accounting practices. This again provides evidence that the cultural diversity of Asia may contribute to differences in accounting and reporting practices. A limited interpretation of the resultant groupings is provided.

A three‐year study, partly funded by the Quality, Design and Education Division of the Department of Trade and Industry, has been carried out on the general subject of quality improvement. As part of this work a literature survey of the English language papers was conducted on such issues as the effects of international competition, the nature of quality management, organisations and change, leadership, how companies set about quality improvement and supplier development. In order to examine topics pertinent to the research subject, the search covered not only the general literature on quality management but also the literature on corporate strategy, marketing, organisational psychology and operations management. The main findings from the literature search are presented and guidance is provided on some authoritative reading on quality improvement.

OD conceptualisation has been criticised as being both underdeveloped and too unduly narrow in its focus. Several ways that OD′s conceptualisation might be enhanced are suggested: on the one hand by differentiating its models and theories in terms of their conceptual level or scope, and on the other hand in terms of an enlarged set of fundamental organisational tasks, different levels of change agent intentionality, and the time frame involved in change. These suggested ways of reconceptualising the theoretic possibilities for OD would move it away from its mostly fix‐it, how‐to, internal problem‐solving image.

The conflict between Iran and Iraq is not new; it dates from long before September 1980. In fact, the origins of the current war can be traced to the battle of Qadisiyah in Southern Iraq in 637 A.D., a battle in which the Arab armies of General Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas decisively defeated the Persian army. In victory, the Arab armies extended Islam east of the Zagros Mountains to Iran. In defeat, the Persian Empire began a steady decline that lasted until the sixteenth century. However, since the beginning of that century, Persia has occupied Iraq three times: 1508–1514, 1529–1543, and 1623–1638. Boundary disputes, specifically over the Shatt al‐Arab Waterway, and old enmities caused the wars. In 1735, belligerent Iranian naval forces entered the Shatt al‐Arab but subsequently withdrew. Twenty years later, Iranians occupied the city of Sulimaniah and threatened to occupy the neighboring countries of Bahrain and Kuwait. In 1847, Iran dominated the eastern bank of the Shatt al‐Arab and occupied Mohamarah in Iraq.

Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities. There are good reasons why students of deviance in particular should be interested in what can be learned from their subjects' explanations of their social practices. Actors are normally called to account for or to explain their activities precisely when these actions are seen by significant others to be in some sense “unreasonable”. Moreover, accounts are central to the processes of law. The purpose of legal judgements is to attribute or withold responsibility. In order to assess an individual's guilt, where criminal activities are concerned, lawyers, judges, and juries pose such questions as: “Did the defendant perform an illegal act?”; “if so, can he or she explain his or her actions in reasonable terms?”; “Was the act in question pre‐meditated?” (that is, “motivated”); and, perhaps most important of all “What is the relationship between the accused's account of his or her involvement in an act, and their real involvement?”

Writings about language and speech impairments (SLI) have been present for many centuries (Smith, 2004). Unfortunately, early historical accounts tended to reflect negatively upon individuals with SLI. For example, Van Riper and Erickson (1996) related that during the Roman times, an individual who stuttered was placed into a cage for entertainment purposes. According to these authors, citizens passing would throw coins into the person's cage to get him to talk. During the late 1800s, the profession of speech-language pathology began as an avocation of certain professionals, notably doctors, educators, and elocutionists (public speakers), who were interested in helping others improve their speech. American doctors studied under the auspices of European doctors who treated people with communication disorders. The two most common disorders that were treated then were dysfluency (stuttering) and speech sound errors (articulation) (Duchan, 2002). Treatment was available for the above disorders, however, the programs were not in public schools and the results of intervention were mixed (Smith, 2004).

After examining recent developments in library architecture in major European and US institutions, the author examines the creation of a “cybrary” on a new university central campus in San Diego, California, USA. He argues that smaller universities that are under tight budget and resource constraints need to prioritize their services, so that they can best determine where technology will have the optimum effect. To decide their priorities, planners need to examine what kind of facility they have and what kind of clientele they wish to serve. National University in San Diego has only recently developed a centralized campus structure; for 30 years it has had a unique program of catering to students at remote locations. The planners decided that the technology needed to enhance their off‐site delivery system, while also providing adequate on‐campus resources. The National University experience demonstrates that the cybrary model is not restricted to large academic or national libraries with large budgets and staffing resources. Establishing priorities enables planners of small library systems to stay on the cutting edge of technological integration.