Management and management accounting concepts and practices---which at an earlier time were of interest to only a few medical school administrators and to still fewer medical school faculty members---have suddenly taken on urgent proportions for many, perhaps even most, American medical schools. Faced with an unhappy combination of increasing demands for ever-broadening public service and public accountability on the one hand, and of an inflation economy with steadily escalating scarcities of manpower, materials, time and, especially, financial resources on the other, medical school faculties and administrators all too frequently now find themselves in the distinctly unenviable position of having to make complex policy and operating decisions of a nature and scope never before required.