CARDIFF BUSINESS SCHOOL WORKING PAPER SERIES Cardiff Working Papers in Accounting and Finance

This paper draws on the work of Streeck and Schmitter (1985) and its subsequent use by Puxty, et al (1987) to analyse the development of accounting regulation in the U.K. public sector. It provides an extension to prior literature through the application of a framework, based on modes of social order, to investigate divergence in the approaches to accounting regulation between the public and private sectors within a single nation state. Despite the advent of ‘New Public Management’, a different balance of the principles of regulation was established and continues to exist in the public sector when compared with that applied in the private sector, reflected by their respective approaches to due process. The conclusion is that the UK public sector accounting regulatory structure remains rooted in the state mode of social order and hence is different from that found in the private sector, despite the rhetoric of modernisation through the adoption of private sector management practices.