Australia is presently seeking to streamline its civil justice system. It is popular folklore that the Australian civil justice system is inaccessible to 'ordinary people' as it is expensive, slow and complex. The reasons for these alleged failings are attributed to various causes, such as arcane and inefficient judicial practices, money-hungry lawyers or, more fundamentally, to the very underpinnings of civil litigation - adversarialism. This volume confronts this folklore.

It provides perspectives about civil justice from its major user and funding source (government) and the group of Australians who have used it the least and feel most alienated from the system (indigenous Australians). It explores the insights of those who work with adversarialism day in and day out (judges and lawyers) and reveals both defenders and strident advocates for change. Finally, it steps back and gives an outsider's view of Australian adversarialism from those with knowledge of a sister system in the United States.

The book is intended for a wide audience and has been written in a style which is readily accessible to people from many different disciplines.

Cappelen Akademisk Forlag (a leading Norwegian Publisher) are pleased to announce the publication of a new and highly challenging book on the rise of New Public Financial Management (NPFM) reforms. Edited by Olov Olson, James Guthrie and Christopher Humphrey, the book is the outcome of a unique two year collaborative project involving 24 senior accounting academics from eleven different countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States of America. The book is intended for a wide audience and has been written in a style which is readily accessible to people from many different disciplines. As John Meyer, Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, observes in his foreword to the book: "This book is about the rise and international impact of a social movement trying to reform public management around the world along rational and rationalistic lines. The roots of the movement are in professional accounting, especially in the private sector, and has gained considerable force in the last two decades, and has had widespread effects on the ways public organizations are perceived, on policies governing them, and sometimes on organizational practices.

Since 1945 the world has undergone vast and fundamental change. The collapse of colonial empires and the tensions of the Cold War produced great political turbulence in many areasnulland integrative movements in others. Now the end of the Cold War has sparked off the breakdown of one of the superpowers and much turmoil elsewhere.

To chart a way through these dramatic developments, leading scholars from Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australia present up-to-date surveys of the experience of each of the world's eleven geopolitical regions. They also consider the contemporary character of sovereign statehood, looking on the one hand at its enduring geographical and psychological bases and on the other at how it has been affected by economic interdependence and ethnicity. The result is an authoritative survey of the international scene during the second half of the twentieth century.