Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Internal control has been enhancing its importance in organizations that need to control their belongings and those of the group that make up the entities. The structural and typological changes of the companies have caused new measures and strategies to adapt to the needs of the environment. An internal control system encompasses those aspects that are directly related to the function of the accounting and finance departments to include control of budgets, standard costs, periodic reports related to operations and statistical analysis. Therefore, the implementation of internal control is done through an integrated system that involves various aspects, such as: principles, regulations, procedures and methodologies. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the literature regarding internal control applied in small and medium-sized companies. Important aspects in the definition of internal control refer that, for the purposes of SMEs, internal control is based on a procedure executed by people based on the implementation of standardized procedures that contribute to the achievement of business objectives. Keywords: financial control, SMEs, principles, business structure.

In the 1850es, the Second Empire settles in after five stormy decades that unveil the vanity of temporal power. The legitimist writers Sophie Rostoptchine, countess de Ségur, and Victorine Monniot, have left a deep imprint in the education of Second Empire young ladies. Their teaching, which taps on practical interpretation of Cahtolic catechism illustrate the Christian principles of renunciation taught by the memento mori while echoing the anguishes of the time. The article aims to study the presence of vanity as a pedagogical tool in Le Journal de Marguerite (1858) and the cycle of Sophie (1858-1859) and to highlight the links between these edifying novels and the fears expressed by Baudelaire and Edmond de Goncourt.

Emile Zola’s journalistic work deals with every aspect of Parisian reality of his time, from “serious” political and social subjects to slight or frivolous ones. The existence of the Parisian upper classes under the reign of Napoleon III is considered by the author as trivial, based on appearances and an ostentatious display of one’s richness. Actually, vanity is the main default of the Parisian high society of the Second Empire, and showing off is their new religion. The everyday parade of wealthy and fashionable people takes place at the Bois of Boulogne, freshly reshaped into an English landscape park. The paper analyzes some elements of this “vanity parade” in relation to Zola’s hostile attitude towards the Second Empire.

Could vanities be the overlooked essence of so-called ‘libertine’ fiction? 18th century French erotic literature has observed and analysed the new human condition on the brink of modernity. There is no more God to fill up the void, no more eternity to hope for beyond human finitude; only humanity, the present moment and the truth of a sensation. The adventures of this fiction’s characters stage the wisdom of the homo bulla that would be, tacitly, a coping mechanism to that new reality. Nothing is vanity for these frivolous beings, as long as the vanity of pleasures manages to keep away the memory of the vanity of life. However, the irony of those narrations suggests, like in the classical model of vanitas, that these temporal delectations may not be enough to avoid angst. The reader is asked a question as he or she discovers in the libertine figure an anamorphosis of all humanity: knowing that you are mortal, what will you choose between anguishes and vanities?

As a symbol of the passage of time, the hourglass is an important iconic element of vanitas paintings. It is also, in the 17th century, the object set on the pulpit of the Protestant preacher who, within the time limits of the hourglass, must exhort the faithful to make good use of their mortal life so they can expect eternal life. The theological and moral discourse of preachers is echoed in the aside sentences that recur in the texts about the little time left to the preacher to deliver his sermon, thus meaning that if human life is vanity, the very discourse conveying the idea must avoid it, banishing all hollow or swollen words, and remain within the limits of the hourglass.

We will analyse the motives of vanity and of contempt of the world in Bossuet’s Carême du Louvre and Sermon pour la profession de La Vallière in both a topical and clearly enunciated perspective. The relationship between Louis XIV and La Vallière raises a religious and political issue: the motive of vanity is used by the preacher not only as a theological argument, but also as a political weapon. The motives of contempt of the world can’t do without the world itself: religious and political fields are constantly reflected on one other.

Chateaubriand’s work is a paradox: he was accused of being vain although he endlessly fought against vanity; he used all the meanings of the word vanity, this, contrary to contemporaneous writers or predecessors like Rousseau and Retz. Hence these questions: Should we reduce his work to a vain and egocentric rhetorical exercise full of brilliance and profusion, varietas, or should we consider its author as the heir of a moralist like Pascal and therefore an “incomprehensible monster” during his century.

Although a distinction between a Still life and a Vanitas painting could rest upon their respective mode of reception: iconographic for the former, iconological for the latter, the interpretation of Vanitas remains highly problematic. In direct opposition to its intended message of repudiation of earthly goods, the Vanitas runs always the risk to be perceived as an incitement to enjoy and rejoice. Tempus fugit? Therefore, carpe diem instead of memento mori.

This article examines the progressive secularization of vanity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Once removed from its theocentric origins, vanity will denote less the vacuity and transience of earthly life and will refer increasingly to socially indecorous behavior that is firmly anchored in the temporal. This shift from the sacred to the saeculum will also cause a shift in the way we imagine vanity’s connoted movements. Once the transient and fleeting, vanity in the 18th century will come to designate the unpliable and the rigid.