Since the mid‐1980s the major players in US health care have argued that costs and benefits should underlie the allocation of health care resources. Looks at 30 cost benefit studies taken from the medical literature and examines five of them in depth, using the “depth hermeneutical”...

Discussion of health care costs has expanded beyond the technical domains of accountancy and entered the realms of public discourse. Analyses this discourse through an examination of all the stories published in The New York Times between 1 April 1992 and 1 May 1993 which contained the phrase...

Discussion about the actual nature of political action is unusual in the literature about the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Examines the treatment of politics in the US standard setting context and this analysis results in the conclusion that despite widespread recognition that...

Investigates the negative effect on employee welfare caused by economic decisions taken by corporate managements which they attribute to the adoption of an accounting standard, focusing on the case of McDonnell Douglas Corporation, which ended health‐care benefits for on‐union employees as a...

Critically examines the ways in which the boundaries of business ethics are being established within business schools, consulting firms and corporations. Contrasts this official discourse on ethics with an alternative, more socially informed, and potentially disruptive approach to the ethics of...

Considers what role history plays in the US accounting standard‐setting process and how this role may be constrained by an emphasis on objectivity and an adherence to a positivistic view of bureaucratic decision making. Explores the role history could play in the development and review of...

Studies the relative focus on the balance sheet and income statement in the Journal of Accountancy and The Accounting Review during the period, 1926‐1936. An index number representing the relative focus for each year for each journal was obtained from a content analysis of a sample of pages...

Technical excess in accounting education has always been a source of discontent among educational reformers, however, two recent developments have rendered these deficiencies even more acute. First, intensified competition for traditional audit services has resulted in an increasingly...

This paper examines the historical means by which accountancy, as a mature profession, has sought to expand its practice to new areas of business. Accountancy has long been eager to satisfy perceived client needs, and in so doing foster an ever widening scope for accounting expertise. However,...