This ground-breaking book introduces macro accounting. Most modern money emerges out of accounting documentation of private executory debt contracts within exchange processes. Money-information markers are basically negotiable (exchangeable for value) debt instruments. Macro accounting techniques provide sufficient detail to examine the complex coupling relations and the resulting constraints among exchanges of good, services, and money-information markers of various sorts.

The book begins with a discussion of the fundamental concepts of trades, exchanges, and the accounting basis of money. Accounting is then described as an aspect of empirical science--a means of observing concrete processes. Drawing on these basic ideas, Swanson extends organizational accounting to societies and supranational systems. The last four chapters simulate economic processes. The book should be read by serious students of economics, accounting, and political science as well as societal policy markers and the international banking community.

The same fundamental logic underlies language and mathematics, and indeed computerized information processing. Based on the three well-developed academic theories of linguistic-mathematical logic, living systems, and hierarchy, this book provides a framework of fundamental logic to help management teams develop customized integrative management theories for their own organizations. Because of the ever increasing complexity of modern societies and organizations, the information that informs and controls organizations cannot always be casually collected and used. Management observation and communication theory provides a way for management teams to document and formally connect the interactions of people, machines, information, and other matter-energy forms and processes to multiple levels of abstracted ideas comprising purposes and goals.

The book begins with a general discussion of living systems theory and linguistic-mathematical theory. From this base, Heiskanen and Swanson discuss a series of applications that examine typical communications in organizations to discover the state of an organization observed by the communicators. They provide more than 80 figures and tables illustrating the applications. The discussion progresses through methods of constructing and using information backdrops for analysis of communications to methods of combining the results of analyses. Methods of syntactical analysis and of semantical analysis are surveyed. This book will be an important tool for management teams concerned with improving the information flows and decision processes of organizations as well as students and professionals concerned with management.

In this work, G.A. Swanson and Hugh Marsh present an interpretive and analytical study of the function of internal auditing, not only from the viewpoint of its role in an organization, but also in regard to the role it plays in the economics of societies and governments. They create a theory of internal auditing and place it within the context of a scientific conceptual framework called Living Systems Theory. Using this approach, they are able to provide a basis for developing a systematic theoretical framework of internal auditing, as well as a theory based on observable, measurable entities.

The book begins with a survey of the auditing profession and an introduction to the basic principles of the Living Systems Theory. From this base, Swanson and Marsh discuss a series of specific issues and areas of concern in internal auditing, including its functions, profession, and history, and its professional standards. Subsequent chapters address such topics as money-information, non-monetary quantitative information, estimating compound measurement and forecasting error, non-quantitative assessments, concrete process analysis and living systems process analysis, and ethics. Throughout the book, Swanson and Marsh identify the advantages of using the living systems theory to advance the knowledge and understanding of organizations, and also propose a higher level of internal audit functions that can advance modern societies. This work will be an important tool for members of the accounting and auditing professions, for students of business and accounting practices, and for professionals in other business and finance positions.