What has been the impact of deregulation and a rapidly changing socio-economic environment on the professions? The cross-disciplinary contributions to this volume examine the changing role of the professions.

Professions and professional activity are undergoing dramatic changes as we approach the millennium. This volume presents an overview of conceptual issues and considers the practical issues facing professionals today. It has two key objectives: to understand the nature of the changes in professional activity; and to see this restructuring in the context of wider socio-economic processes. Examining the professional areas of medicine, education, law and accountancy, the authors illustrate how the nature of professional activity is changing, and how decision making power is being shifted away from the holders of specialized knowledge and towards clients and managers. Although this might seem to signify an end to traditional notions of professionalism involving trust, responsibility and self-organization, they argue that this does not necessarily mean an end to professionalism itself, but rather a rethinking of its significance and functioning. This process is of central importance to political economists, sociologists, organization and management theorists, and anyone who is trying to understand the significance of professional organization in modern British society.

This book advocates and illustrates the power of Interdisciplinary & Critical Perspectives, drawn from a range of social sciences, to critically analyse accounting processes & practices. Its particular focus is the extensive forms of societal regulations & requirements that are made over organisations, particularly public sector organisations, that are driven by forms of accounting, collectively described as Accounting Control in the book. These regulations & requirements are deeply resented by these public sector organisations and, as a result, all manner of resistance strategies are adopted, which are described as Controlling Accounting in the book. The book is primarily conceptual but, given the particular Interdisciplinary & Critical research approach adopted, relies heavily on drawing from empirical cases to develop the conceptual ideas. The book, therefore, analyses actual public sector Accounting Control & Controlling Accounting strategies and counter-strategies primarily, but not exclusively, from the United Kingdom, to develop the conceptual ideas. The book ends with a critical analysis of the forces & counter-forces of Accounting Control & Controlling Accounting.

This is a new edition of the same authors' Management Control: Theories, Issues and Practices. The book provides undergraduate and postgraduate students of management control, together with interested practitioners, with a thoroughly contemporary overview of the area. Whilst the core of the original book is retained, new chapters are added on knowledge management, risk and control in Networks.