The story of business ethics would seem to be a tale of horses, deckchairs, Molotovs and ostriches. There is little evidence that the growth in organisational codes of ethics (OCoE) in recent years has had much effect on organisational activity. Such was also the experience with the social...

Agency theory is extensively employed in the accounting literature to explain and predict the appointment and performance of external auditors. Argues that agency theory also provides a useful theoretical framework for the study of the internal auditing function. Proposes that agency theory not...

Developments in the internal audit profession appear to be heading along two different paths. Role confusion among auditors is common, and strategic planning in the audit function is very difficult as a result. Presents a transformation model which explains the changes and the growth of the...

The second of two articles dealing with a survey of health care internal auditing in the United States. The first article appeared in Vol. 7 No. 6, 1992. The second article builds on the first and deals with: the allocation of time to various internal audit activities and the rationale employed...

Provides background information on how internal audit has developed during its brief history, with various seminal conferences being milestones. There has been resistance to overcome and in some cases, where internal audit had been dismantled, it has now been re‐established. Reports on how a...

The purpose of this study is to examine mentoring as an important resource in coping with rapid organizational change during the merger of two international accounting firms. Shortly after their merger, 28 pairs of management advisory services (MAS) professionals, i.e., protégés and their...

Purpose The shift from the traditional audit towards performance audit implies that internal auditors in the public sector function as change agents who underpin the fundamental change process. This paper aims to propose a model that identifies the determinants of organisational change in the...

The concepts of joint optimization and socio‐technical systems have been in the literature for over 40 years. However, efforts to operationalize these concepts for managerial practice have not progressed at the same pace as the theory on joint optimization has advanced. This paper represents...

This first in a series of discussions introduces strategic deployment, a process that will equip an entire organization to perform at its peak in efficiency, profitability and in meeting customers’ needs. The process identifies and integrates every operation throughout an enterprise that has a...