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• "Beyond Budgeting" Or "More Budgeting"? - A Survey (Stephen LYNE)
  Proponents of "beyond budgeting" (Hope and Fraser, 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003) have suggested that traditional budgeting has become unnecessary and possibly strongly dysfunctional in the modern, rapidly changing world. A survey of companies in the South-west of England was undertaken in order to gauge changes in budgeting practice and shed light on whether companies are following the call to move "beyond budgeting". By concentrating on companies that had expressed an interest in joining a BRICMAR (Bristol centre for Management Accounting Research) panel a good survey response of 42.4% was obtained. 40 companies from the industrial and service sectors were represented in the survey and this paper reports practice in these companies. In 20 of the 40 companies there were responses from both financial and non-financial managers and this permitted some investigation of differences in functional attitudes to budgeting.
  
  All the companies prepare budgets and the picture of budgeting practice that emerged was a traditional, almost textbook pattern.
  
  
• "European Value Relevance and the Impact of Analysts' Forecasts, Taxation and Exchange Rate Movements: Evidence on the Feltham and Ohlson (1995) Model" (Mr Christos Grambovas)
  The creation of a Pan-European Stock market has been increasingly under duscussion lately. It seems that such a common stock market would be most appropriate for the European area with the highest degree of unification and a common currency, i.e. the Euro-zone. However, the market valuation of firms and its relation with accounting data differs from country to country. This comes as no surprise if one considers the differences among the markets and especially the diversity among accounting systems. Accounting harmonisation and standardisation has to be a prerequisite for the creation of a Pan-European stock market but also for the further integration of the EU member states, and consequently it is pursued by the European Commission.
  
  
  
• "KEEP CALM OR CHANGE YOUR COURSE": THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP STYLE AND MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING SYSTEM ON PERFORMANCE (Associated Professor David Naranjo- Gil)
  "Organizations have to adapt to the new competitive and dynamic environment, to do that some firms change their strategy, others only their leadership styles, and others both of them. This research attempts to explain the role of Management Accounting System on performance of organizations adopting certain leadership styles and strategic choice.
  
  
  
• "mind the gap": bridging theory and practice in accountancy education and training (Fiona Anderson)
  This paper builds on ongoing work into the changing nature of accountancy work and training. We argue that there has been a transitive shift in both accountancy work and training because there has been an underlying shift in the nature of accounting knowledge. That knowledge has become increasingly transdisciplinary . In other words, there is still a technical disciplinary core of accounting knowledge, which may vary slightly country by country in terms of how it is defined and labelled, but always involves an understanding of financial accounts and their relation to management, business and the law. But having this core is no longer sufficient for undertaking successful accountancy work. This shift from a simple disciplinary model of accounting to a transdisciplinary one has significant implications for the professional identity of the accountant , and for accountancy education and training.
  
  
• (Maybe) not that dysfunctional after all: Audit quality reduction behaviours and the evolution of auditing methods (Olivier HERRBACH)
  Audit quality has been a pervasive research issue in the accounting literature. Most of this research has been external in focus, i.e. it has considered audit firms as homogeneous social units without taking into account the fact that they are a collection of individuals with different interests. While there have been several published studies about the perception of audit quality by the external environment, there has been much less interest in studying how individual behaviour inside audit firms could affect audit quality. This is unfortunate since audit quality largely rests on audit team members’ performance.