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The euro’s introduction initially confronts a firm with a currency changeover problem affecting its accounting and reporting systems. The company’s controller can solve this initial problem by means of an electronic data processing project. For the project’s duration, it is crucial to maintain reporting transparency by providing for successive transition of accounting subsystems from the national currency to the euro. Yet, with barely six months remaining until national currencies cease to be legal tender, few firms have prepared their accounting systems for conversion to the euro. Moreover, switching currencies constitutes just a small part of a far larger, complex set of related problems. That is because the common currency’s introduction also influences many business parameters of differing importance to management. Generalized checklists help managers little in dealing with the specific impacts such influences may have on an enterprise. Accordingly, the controller must identify the relative importance and sequence of changes necessary in each of the firm’s functional areas. The euro’s introduction furthermore represents an opportunity for management to modernize the company’s IT structures and to start using both the Internet and data warehouses.

This paper explores the comprehensiveness of management accountants’ planning and the resource consumption associated with it in Chinese small enterprises (SEs).

The methodology involves correlation and regression analyses of online survey responses.

The study findings are as follows: planning comprehensiveness and the resource consumption associated with it vary greatly across Chinese SEs; there is a trade-off between these two aspects of planning; and provision of linkages within and across plan types, employment of valuation analytics and the use of future-oriented techniques and tools, as well as joint venturing with a foreign partner explain roughly three-quarters of the observed differences in planning behavior.

With no readily accessible source to ensure random selection of the units of analysis, this study relies on a convenience sample. Participants’ survey responses may contain a residual element of key informant bias.

This study uses primary data exclusively. It demonstrates a general trade-off between the comprehensiveness of management accountants’ planning and the associated resource consumption in Chinese SEs. Its novelty also derives from an approach that explains intercompany differences in the observed behavior via variables heretofore seldom used in empirical research.

This article aims to summarize several studies about how businesses currently practice budgeting in Western and Central Europe. While analyzing these studies in the larger context of the ongoing debate about budgeting's importance, it provides conceptual linkages between them and additional insights into their findings.

The reported studies employ survey research, sometimes with panels of self‐selected interviewees within a single country and sometimes with samples of SMEs across multiple countries.

Recent survey results continue to show managers complaining about the wastefulness of preparing budgets, while steadfastly believing they are indispensable. Among others, Horváth and Partners accordingly advocate “advanced budgeting” concepts to modernize both planning and budgeting processes. CFO‐panel participants generally uphold the advocates' position except in the crucial area of available IT‐support. However, as explained next, connecting operational and strategic planning is primarily a conceptual rather than a hard‐ or software problem. In the European automobile suppliers' industry, controlling services therefore generally still rely on a small set of well‐understood standard tools.

Firms not using these standard tools in their operational controlling risk falling behind the competition. In order to close the gap between the perceived importance of and satisfaction with more complex instruments, however, several tools require improvement or simplification as well as conceptual clarity about how to employ them.

This article presents results from diverse studies on budgeting as currently practiced, reform concepts, and obstacles to their implementation. In doing so, it discusses how they relate to one another and what their significance is for both theory and practice.

The purpose of this article is to analyze problems involved in using a four‐tiered, indirect sales‐and‐distribution (S&D) model and describe how a manufacturing small and medium‐sized enterprise's (SME's) controller can master them.

The approach taken is an in‐depth case study of an Asian SME selling its homeopathic remedies through European wholesalers and retailers to geographically dispersed consumers.

The case study provides four main conclusions. First, entering into an indirect S&D relationship with wholesalers and retailers is just one more step along the road to outsourcing an enterprise's non‐core functions in a global economy. Second, as long as an SME is on this road, its controller must make the best of the situation and master the resulting complexity in the areas of sales and distribution. Third, above all, integrating business partners' wholesale and retail trade data into the SME's own management information system represents a major technical challenge. Fourth, presenting a clear, complete, and multidimensional overview of sales figures and inventory levels is a task likely to demand more time and attention in the future.

The research methodology employed here is descriptive, not explanatory. Because the study observes just one firm, it may not be representative of the general SME population. Moreover, much of the information collected is retrospective data and recollections of past events, which may be subject to problems inherent with memory or inadequate recordkeeping. Nevertheless, the findings form a foundation for better understanding the use of a four‐tiered, indirect S&D model.

While much of the literature explicitly or implicitly assumes use of direct S&D models, this article specifically addresses problems arising from an SME's employment of an indirect model and its loss of direct contact with consumers.

To report how an SME developed strategic and operational balanced scorecards (BSCs) as well as benchmarks for use in e‐commerce.

The report begins with the initial management meeting, in which participants set goals for the firm, specified causal linkages among those goals, and identified appropriate strategies for attaining them. It then explains the perspectives chosen to structure the BSCs. Next, it summarizes results from analyzing proposed operational goals, concrete action plans, and key performance indicators to ensure inclusion of all potentials for growth. The report gives concrete examples of how management bundled proposed goals and actions into projects, budgeted them, and committed responsible actors. In addition, it describes how the firm used BSC development to institute a continuous learning process, while providing feedback to various stakeholders both within the firm and across its parent holding company.

For many small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises, the development, introduction, and use of BSCs and benchmarks certainly seem feasible. Although relatively few have done so thus far, the managers of these firms likely would find it worthwhile to analyze their businesses on the basis of BSC‐perspectives.

This report covers step by step the successful implementation of BSC and benchmarking methodologies in an e‐commerce firm, while overcoming many of the handicaps associated with doing so in SMEs.

Balanced scorecards are having a major impact on executives’ strategic decision making by encouraging their use of future‐oriented, non‐monetary success indicators. This article explains how to create a balanced scorecard with a reasonable number of indicators, set appropriate benchmarks for them, and evaluate overall management performance against those benchmarks. In doing so, it relies heavily on a controlling tool that is new to the business sector: data envelopment analysis. After discussing the theoretical foundations of this nonparametric optimization procedure and defining several key terms, the article presents a practical example. The example assesses management's performance from several perspectives, paying particular attention to implications of the analytic results for a firm's strategic and operational controlling. The article also offers an overview of various models for data envelopment analysis, describes limits to its use, and concludes with a summary of key findings.

the paper aims to reviews the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting‐edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

The paper finds that, as always with new business phenomena or trends, all the talk “in the literature” focuses on the experience of Blue Chip companies or high profile industries such as automotive manufacturing or IT, while small to medium‐sized companies (SMEs) are often left in the shadows. However much of the interesting innovation occurs in these companies, and ignoring them often misses out key aspects of these trends, as well as the different dynamics that operate within them.

The paper provides strategic insights and practical thinking that have influenced some of the world's leading organizations.

The briefing saves busy executives and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy‐to‐digest format.

In the last four years, since Volume I of this Bibliography first appeared, there has been an explosion of literature in all the main functional areas of business. This wealth of material poses problems for the researcher in management studies — and, of course, for the librarian: uncovering what has been written in any one area is not an easy task. This volume aims to help the librarian and the researcher overcome some of the immediate problems of identification of material. It is an annotated bibliography of management, drawing on the wide variety of literature produced by MCB University Press. Over the last four years, MCB University Press has produced an extensive range of books and serial publications covering most of the established and many of the developing areas of management. This volume, in conjunction with Volume I, provides a guide to all the material published so far.

It is not surprising that the dominant cognitive frame through which most audiences view climate change is that of an environmental problem. However, this messaging strategy has proven susceptible to counter-attacks, defensing processing, and other cognitive biases. As such, many environmental advocates are switching gears. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, the environment-as-public-health-concern narrative is increasingly found in climate change messages. This strategy involves making the abstract issue of climate change more concrete by tying it to negative health impacts, like asthma, heat-related illness, and the spread of disease. Understanding why and for whom this strategy is persuasive, particularly in a social media context where users often encounter persuasive climate change messages, can help advance theory and practice.

The purpose of this chapter is two-fold: 1.) Test the effects of climate message frame (damage to nature or damage to public health), message source (liberal or conservative organization), and the use of visual human exemplars (present or absent) in social media messages; and, 2.) Assess the predictive utility of different conceptual frameworks (personification, construal level theory, and moral foundations theory) as explanatory mechanisms for persuasive social media climate message effects. The results of a nation-wide experiment reveal that the use of visual exemplars matters when climate change is framed as an environmental problem, but otherwise message frame, source, and visual exemplar use have little impact on policy attitudes. Further analyses demonstrated that multiple conceptual mechanisms related to the aforementioned theories help explain social media effects on climate change attitudes.