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A new regulatory regime for issuing, and enforcing compliance with, accounting standards has been established in the UK. It includes an enforcement body, the Financial Reporting Review Panel (FRRP), which is responsible for examining alleged departures from the Companies Act and accounting standards by companies. The FRRP has secured revisions in company accounts which were regarded as defective, and has issued press notices summarising the defects and the remedial action taken. The FRRP was intended to strengthen auditors in their negotiations with directors, but there are tensions in the relationship as the majority of companies receiving a press notice had unqualified audit reports. The FRRP has reported auditors to their professional body, but no action has been taken against any auditors to date.

The paper aims to examine the role, funding and status of Network Rail, a very significant example of New Labour's attempt to operationalise the “third way”. The analysis of Network Rail is used to critique the “third way” approach to policy‐making in Britain.

The paper examines Network Rail, and the significant changes that have occurred since its creation, in the context of the claims originally made for the company by Transport Secretary Byers. It employs critical financial analysis and non‐financial performance indicators to examine the “third way” approach to rail privatisation, drawing on the work of its leading supporter in the UK, Giddens, and its leading critic, Callinicos.

The paper demonstrates that Network Rail is an expensive mechanism for channelling public money to private companies. It argues that the “third way” is really a smoke screen for the neo‐liberal ideology, behind which there is a continuing transfer of wealth from taxpayers to the private sector.

The paper focuses on one significant example of the “third way” approach to policy making. It demonstrates the strength of the neo‐liberal ideology, particularly the belief in the value of privatisation, in the UK.

The findings of the paper have implications for public policy and for those affected by rail privatisation, including employees, passengers and taxpayers.

Researchers and practitioners working in the area of public sector management and reforms should find the paper of value.

The purpose of this paper is to contest Edwards et al.’s (2002) findings that resistance to the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping and the form that it took when implemented by the British Government in the mid-nineteenth century was the result of ideological conflict between the privileged landed aristocracy and the rising merchant middle class.

The study draws upon a collection of documents preserved as part of the Grigg Family Papers located in London and the Thomson Papers held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney. It also draws on evidence contained within the British National Archive, the National Maritime Museum and British Parliamentary Papers which has been overlooked by previous studies of the introduction of DEB.

Conflict and delays in the adoption of double-entry bookkeeping were not primarily the product of “ideological” differences between the influential classes. Instead, this study finds that conflict was the result of a complex amalgam of class interests, ideology, personal antipathy, professional intolerance and ambition. Newly discovered evidence recognises the critical, largely forgotten, work of John Deas Thomson in developing a double-entry bookkeeping system for the Royal Navy and the importance of Sir James Graham’s determination that matters of economy would be emphasised in the Navy’s accounting.

This study establishes that crucial to the ultimate implementation of double-entry bookkeeping was the passionate, determined support of influential champions with strong liberal beliefs, most especially John Deas Thomson and Sir James Graham. Prominence was given to economy in government.

In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum (1996) offers one version of an argument frequently repeated in the history of law-and-literature scholarship; to wit, that the literary imagination performs a salutary function with regard to many domains of modern public life. While law and economics are governed by logics of bureaucratic rationality and utilitarian calculus, literature, in particular the novel, presents a counterdiscourse, inviting us to empathize with others, expanding our moral sense, emphasizing the importance of affect and imagination in the making of a just, humane, and democratic society. Nussbaum's broad goal is a commendable one; concerned that “cruder forms of economic utilitarianism and cost-benefit analysis that are…used in many areas of public policy-making and are frequently recommended as normative for others” are, in effect, dehumanizing, she argues for the importance to public life of “the sort of feeling and imagining called into being” by the experience of reading literary texts (1996, p. 3). This sort of feeling and imagining, Nussbaum explains, fosters sympathetic understanding of others who may be quite different from us and a deepened awareness of human suffering.

Few regret the passing of an old year, with its darkening days and cold nights, its message fading as the voice weakens. A new year always looks more attractive with hopes of better things to come, but an occasional look back over one's shoulder, as it were, is seldom completely without profit, for experience can sometimes be more potent than hope. 1968 seemed to have more than its share of uncertainties, tragedies and disasters, in this country and in the world at large. An unsure economic state, to say nothing of monetary confusion, was reflected in every field of industry and public administration, but in the field of food quality and purity control, steady progress towards a comprehensive system of food standards, of hygiene and of food additive control was maintained. In fact, the year may be seen as not an entirely unfruitful one, with one or two events which may well prove to be landmarks.

The starting point for the paper is an assessment of the impact of a 1993 special issue of Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, which provided an interdisciplinary analysis of the pursuit of accountable management reforms in the UK public sector. From this assessment, the paper offers a set of reflections on the development over the last two decades of “new” public management practice and research, and also indicates some of the obligations and responsibilities of academic researchers and managers alike in the context of a continuing appetite for such reforms.

The paper is written in a reflective fashion, including assessments of: our role as guest editors of the special issue; the continuing pertinence of key messages emanating from the special issue; and broader considerations drawn from our own working experience in managerial roles in universities and personal reflections on the state of the public management literature.

The paper highlights the long‐standing litany of failure attached to such public management reform movements, as well as the limited degree of cross‐disciplinary learning within the field. The paper emphasises that we need to rethink the parameters of “public sector” (accounting) research, and avoid the partitioning of (accounting) research into ever smaller and self‐referential sub‐areas. We need more cross‐national studies. We need to know more about which management practices travel readily, and which travel less easily, and what happens when implementation is problematic. We need also to reinforce the importance of historical analyses, if we are to derive the most benefit from studies of the interrelations among accounting and public management reforms and wider transformations in ways of governing economic and social life. Finally, we need to retain or reinstate curiosity at the heart of our concerns, in order to dispel the self‐evidence or taken‐for‐grantedness of so much of our present.

Personal reflections, while being beneficially close to the subject under consideration, inevitably suffer from claims of bias and a lack of independence. We have sought to control for such risks by drawing on a variety of sources of information with respect to impact, including (albeit ironically) citation counts and an analysis of the writings of individual authors contributing to the special issue.

The paper is novel in that it seeks to combine an analysis of the literature on public sector accounting and management reforms over several decades with our own, multi‐faceted, engagement with public management research and practice.

‘EVERY patron of a public library is an individual endowed with free choice. But to what extent is the public library acting as an effective neutraliser of individuality?’

The study focusses on explaining why advocates for reform to state audit in the United Kingdom (UK) in the early 1980s, focussed on improving the links between the new National Audit Office (NAO) and Parliament, rather than on traditional notions of audit independence. The study shows how this focus on the auditor's link to Parliament depends on a particular concept of liberty and relates this to the wider literature on the place of audit in democratic society.

Understanding the issue of independence of audit in protecting the liberties and rights of citizens needs addressed. In this article, the authors investigate the creation of audit independence in the UK in the National Audit Act (1983). To do so, the authors employ a neo-Roman concept of liberty to historical archives ranging from the late 1960s to 1983.

The study shows that advocates for audit reform in the UK from the 1960s to the 1980s were arguing for an extension to Parliament's power to hold the executive to account and that their focus was influential on the way that the new NAO was established. Using a neo-Roman concept of liberty, the authors show that they believed Parliamentary surveillance of the executive was necessary to secure liberty within the UK.

The neo-Roman republican concept of liberty extends previous studies in considering the importance of audit for public accountability, the preservation of liberty and democracy.

Public sector audit can be a fundamentally democratic activity. Auditors should be alert to the constitutional importance of their work and see parliamentary accountability as a key objective.

The neo-Roman concept of liberty extends previous studies in considering the importance of audit for public accountability, preservation of liberty and democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of the “Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal (AAAJ) Community”, a flourishing international interdisciplinary accounting research community. This scholarly community has emerged over some 30 years from the publication in 1988 of the inaugural issue of AAAJ under the joint editorship of James Guthrie and Lee Parker. This historical account discusses the motivation for establishing the journal and the important publishing initiatives, developments and trends across this period. The study positions the journal as a key thought leader, the catalyst for other Community activities such as the Asia-Pacific Interdisciplinary Research in Accounting conference.

The investigation involved a selective review of the contents of AAAJ, particularly the annual editorials published since inception, and other relevant literature, analysis of the main research themes and the most cited papers, and oral history interviews with the joint editors. The future prospects for the AAAJ Community are addressed.

The AAAJ Community has shaped and led developments in interdisciplinary accounting research. Recognised for innovation and with a reputation for nurturing scholars, AAAJ continues to grow in stature as one of the world’s leading accounting journals, challenging the status quo and fostering inclusive scholarship.

The study does not examine the journal’s publication patterns nor assess in detail the research studies that have been published in the journal.

The study recognises AAAJ as central to the development of an interdisciplinary accounting research community, firmly located in the sociological, critical and interpretative tradition also associated with some other leading accounting journals.