Health care systems are under pressure to adopt contemporary management practices including activity based costing (ABC). This paper reports an intensive case study of the design of an ABC system in a newly organized public foundation hospital in Spain. The study covered a few years and was based on interviews, observations, and extensive review of documentation.   The analysis draws on an institutional sociology framework .  A primary finding is that there was no conflict between physicians and administration, unlike the previous wisdom that such conflict is inherent in ABC implementation. Training medical personnel in management and involving them in management, as well as educating implementers in medical issues represented major reasons for no conflict. Although no generalizable outside this specific context, it provides the basis for broader empirical research.

The mandatory use of IFRS by all publicly listed companies in the European Union created challenges for accounting and reporting of business combinations, goodwill impairment and disclosures for these items. Major issues are allocation of amounts to goodwill and specific intangible assets arising from acquisition. This study presents an in-depth exploration of compliance with IFRS 3 and IAS 36 using content analysis methodology of annual reports of eight European telecommunications companies that were chose because the industry is well known for significant acquisitions involving intangibles. The results show only partial compliance with little change over the four year period since mandatory IFRS adoption. While results cannot be generalized outside this group, the in-depth analysis yielded important insights for continued research using broader research methods.

The mandatory use of IFRS by all publicly listed companies in the European Union created challenges for accounting and reporting of business combinations, goodwill impairment and disclosures for these items. Major issues are allocation of amounts to goodwill and specific intangible assets arising from acquisition. This study presents an in-depth exploration of compliance with IFRS 3 and IAS 36 using content analysis methodology of annual reports of eight European telecommunications companies that were chose because the industry is well known for significant acquisitions involving intangibles. The results show only partial compliance with little change over the four year period since mandatory IFRS adoption. While results cannot be generalized outside this group, the in-depth analysis yielded important insights for continued research using broader research methods.

Budget effectiveness in multinational companies receives research interest because of globalisation. Research to date has used contingency-theory methods which have limitations. A systems-fit approach, which views organisations and systems holistically, is a complementary alternative. Compared with reductionistic contingency framework methods using regression analysis, it emphasises holistic methods related to effectiveness and deals with the inherent complexity of multinationals. This study examines the effectiveness of budget control systems in a Finnish multinational company using the systems approach. The tests examined the correlation of the fit of different profiles with effectiveness of the budget control system for both domestic and foreign subunits under conditions of high and low environmental uncertainty. No significant difference between domestic and foreign subunits is detected. Reliance on budget control is not inherently dysfunctional. The study demonstrates the viability of the systems-fit research approach.