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Edmund Burke, the 18th century Irish orator said … ‘those who propose change should work hard to persuade a rational man that innovations or reforms would not end in damage or absurdity’.

The purpose of this paper is to address the lack of knowledge of the accounting occupational group in England prior to the formation of professional accounting bodies. It aims to do so by focusing on attempts made by writing masters and accountants to establish a recognisable persona in the public domain, in England, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to enhance that identity by behaving in a manner designed to persuade the public of the professionalism associated with themselves and their work.

The study is based principally on the contents of early accounting treatises and secondary sources drawn from beyond the accounting literature. Notions of identity, credentialism and jurisdiction are employed to help understand and evaluate the occupational history of the writing master and accountant occupational group.

Writing masters and accountants emerged as specialist pedagogues providing the expert business knowledge required in the counting houses of entities that flourished as the result of rapid commercial expansion during the early modern period. Their demise as an occupational group may be attributed to a range of factors, amongst which an emphasis on personal identity, the neglect of group identity and derogation of the writing craft were most important.

The paper highlights Early English Books Online (available at: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (available at: www.gale.cengage.com/DigitalCollections/products/ecco/index.htm) and the seventeenth and eighteenth century Burney Collection Newspapers as first class electronic resources now available for studying accounting history from the sixteenth century through to the eighteenth century.

The paper advances knowledge of accounting history by: profiling commercial educators active in England in the early modern period; studying the devices they employed to achieve upward social and economic trajectory; explaining the failure of an embryonic professionalisation initiative; and demonstrating the contingent nature of the professionalisation process.

This paper builds on the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) Report, which examined US Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases (AAERs). The purpose of this paper is to provide valuable insights into the characteristics and realities of financial statement fraud in the post‐Enron regulatory environment.

This paper analyses a sample of AAERs from 2002 to 2005. It also provides case studies of an additional five high‐profile case studies from that period.

This paper finds evidence of changes in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement activities since the COSO Report. Specifically, it is found that enforcement activities have increased substantially post‐Enron and the companies subject to AAERs are, on average, much larger, more profitable and the frauds are more substantial than those exhibited in the COSO Report. These findings suggest that the SEC has become more aggressive at pursuing larger companies for financial statement fraud in the post‐Enron environment.

This paper relies on AAERs as the source of analysis of financial statement fraud, its findings must be viewed in light of the limitations of using these documents. Specifically, the prevailing prosecutions agenda of the US SEC may be reflected in these results.

The study findings are of great practical relevance to accounting regulators and practitioners as they provide valuable insights into the nature and characteristics of financial statement fraud.

The paper provides empirical evidence concerning the changing face of financial statement fraud enforcement and provides a more in‐depth comparison of fraud than possible with most previous studies that have tended to focus on quantitative measures. This is possible because the present investigation utilises qualitative data from AAERs to supplement quantitative findings. Its originality is also due to the use of institutional theory which is not commonly applied in the corporate governance field.

The UK is experiencing an extraordinary cost-of-living crisis as inflation and prices continue to rise. Energy bills are soaring, and food prices are rising to record rates, with no expectation that prices will drop in 2023. The current economic side effect is the rise of buy now pay later and the increasing reliance on credit cards. The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether employers introducing more flexible payment policies can improve the financial well-being of their employees.

The article analyses statistics and reports from various sources which provide detail on the impact of the cost-of-living crisis and the financial stress it causes on employees. The article evaluates sources and studies which explore the limitations of monthly pay and viable alternatives including flexible pay.

The article provides findings on the rise of short-term credit and buy now pay later schemes due to the cost-of-living crisis and how this is impacting on the workplace. The article discovers the significant benefits in introducing free flexible pay to employers and workers, from breaking the feast and famine cycle of monthly pay to improving well-being, productivity and absenteeism.

This research will be valuable for HR professionals and employers who are currently dealing with the cost-of-living crisis and are looking for cost-effective ways of helping employees financially in 2023.

The purpose of this paper is to identify some key issues for the analysis of corporate governance based on the papers within this special issue including the Guest Editor's perspectives.

The five papers included in this special issue are summarized and their main contribution to the literature is highlighted.

The paper collectively deal with the role and impact of corporate boards on the quality of information provided to capital markets.

The theoretical and empirical research included in the special issue advance the understanding of corporate governance which provides impetus for practitioner and policy change.

The normative concepts of best practice need to be validated by empirical testing in the context of firms and their institutional settings. This suite of papers provides evidence of the effectiveness of corporate governance in improving accounting quality.

Many of the difficulties that have been experienced by Health Authorities in this country in the examination of imported butcher's “offal”—using the term “offal” in its trade sense—would seem to have been due to injudicious methods of packing on the other side. The organs that constitute “offal”—livers, plucks, kidneys, sweetbreads, and so forth—have hitherto been closely packed into a bag, box, or crate, and the whole mass then frozen hard. Hence on arrival at the port of inspection the separate examination of these organs for possible disease conditions was rendered a matter of extreme difficulty. The exporters have now, it appears, almost all arranged for the separate freezing of the larger organs before packing, and in the case of smaller organs, such as kidneys and sweetbreads, some packers now make use of shallow boxes.

The articles in this Special Issue of the IJSSP, entitled ‘Sociology of Emotions’, were, with two exceptions, presented at the 90th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association held in Washington, D.C., U.S.A., from August 19–23, 1995. These outstanding papers do much to develop the theoretical grounding of two closely related fields of inquiry ‐ the social psychology of emotions and the sociology of emotions. No social relations are carried out in the absence of either thought or emotion. It immediately follows that the sociology of emotions is not so much a nascent, exotic sub‐discipline of sociology as it is a level of analysis that must be carried out if meaning is to be found in any social system, in any social process, or in any social relationship of the everyday world.

It is unlikely that many public meetings of library workers will be held during the coming winter. In London, at any rate, the preoccupations of the time have increased in intensity rather than otherwise; the darkness of the streets is more or less opaque; the train difficulties are very real; and those who might receive librarians at their libraries are loth to keep their buildings open to later hours than are absolutely necessary. The Library Association shows no disposition to hold meetings and the President, whose hospitality made some pleasant gatherings possible last year, finds it impossible to extend that hospitality this winter. The suggestion that an occasional afternoon meeting might be held does not seem to have been made, but we hope it will be considered. At such a time as this we cannot afford to lose any opportunity for an exchange of ideas upon our work.