John Roberts

• The University of Sydney

This introduction to the special issue aims to contextualize and critically comment on the current trajectory of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in both scholarly inquiry and business practice. It suggests that we must place it within the milieu of the ongoing economic crisis and the failure of a number of important opportunities to make busi...

This paper develops a critique of the concept of ‘ethical identity’ as this has been used recently to distinguish between ‘cynical’ and ‘authentic’ forms of corporate responsibility. Taking as our starting point Levinas’ demanding view of responsibility as ‘following the assignation of responsibility for my neighbour’, we use a case study of a pack...

The notion of ‘ownership of the firm’ is central to conventional treatments of corporate governance, yet there is very little discussion about what this means in practice. In this paper we briefly draw attention to some of the debates around the notion of ownership in various disciplinary fields, and then recount and discuss some of the meanings as...

Corporate governance is a complex and contested issue, and its ambiguities become even more problematic when ethical considerations are taken into account. This introduction attempts to address these complexities, to illuminate their ethical aspects, and to situate the eight papers presented here within what we believe to be an integrative heuristi...

This paper presents the preliminary findings from an in-depth qualitative study of therelationships between chairmen and chief executives in major UK corporations. This relationshipis at the heart of a number of other key relationships within the organisation, in particular thosebetween the two key role holders and the board and between the board a...

The arrival of a new CEO is one of the most critical events in the life of an organisation. The CEO plays a central role in co-ordination and leadership, in liaison with the outside world, in strategy formation and implementation. Succession is a vital opportunity to ensure continuity and renewal. In theory there are well established routines for t...

This paper describes a case study which traces the introduction of a new accounting control system into the unit companies of a division of a large multidivisional company and explores the antecedents and consequences of the resistance encountered by the project development team. The objectives of the study are to explore the complex web of social...

The concern of this paper is to extend the critique of accounting through an exploration of the more inclusive concept of accountability. The paper begins by stating the positive effects upon the individual of being held accountable, and then goes on to explore how different forms of accountability produce different senses of our self and our relat...

This paper sets out to explore various aspects of the relationship between the use of accounting information for performance reporting and control and the formulation and implementation of business and corporate strategy. It does this by means of a case study of the acquisition and subsequent management of “ELB Ltd” by “Conglom Inc.” The case gives...

In this paper we want to present some empirical material drawn from our research into the uses and usefulness of accounting information in divisionalised companies. Our first difficulty in approaching this task was to find a suitable way of presenting accounting. The writers of management accounting textbooks, such as Horngren (1982), Drury (1985)...

In this paper we argue that understanding accounting practices in their organisational contexts requires more than a technical description of accounting information systems as they are conceived and designed in abstract. What is required are studies of the way in which accounting systems become embodied, through use, in organisational systems of ac...

The central concern of this monograph is to generate an understanding of the processes of control in industrial relations. Traditionally, the literature has tended to merely reflect the instrumental interests of management and has thus been preoccupied with the problem of improving the techniques, rather than penetrating the social processes of con...

This article presents some of the problems that need to be resolved if organization is to be developed to its full potential. Our central argument is that both management and staff typically act on the basis of a false understanding of the nature of power. Power is typically treated as if it were an individual possession, rather than as a relations...