Financial Accountability & Management

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 0267-4424

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Latest documents

Twenty‐five years of studying new public management in public administration: Accomplishments and limitations
In 1991, Christopher Hood made a substantial contribution to public administration research when he formulated the concept of new public management (NPM). His article can in many ways be understood as an enabler of research focused on public sector reforms. To this day, numerous articles and books have been published, discussing the concept itself and the empirical phenomenon. In celebration of the 25‐year period since the concept of NPM was introduced, this article revisits the current knowledge through a systematic literature review of 299 articles published between 1991 and 2016. This approach enables a meta‐analysis of research published in five top‐ranked international public administration journals. We identify four important themes as emerging from our review: (a) a reform with a vague intention, (b) the limping concept, (c) the one‐sided perspective, and (d) NPM as the new norm. An important effect of this is that Hood's framework may have been curtailed, leading to a distorted knowledge base when it comes to future studies.
Quantified control in healthcare work: Suggestions for future research
This paper outlines promising avenues for empirical research on quantified control in healthcare work. A review of key insights from accounting, organization studies, and the emergent sociology of quantification indicates that numbers are productive as well as deceptive and seductive, that they enable control but can be evaded, and that they typically have unintended effects. It remains to be further explored how multiple forms of measurement and quantified control play out in everyday healthcare work. Other questions worth probing concern the limits and capabilities of numbers as a shared language, the differential and disciplinary effects of numbers on social groups, the use of numbers for impression management, and how people manage to resist or mobilize numbers for different purposes. Calling for additional qualitative, close‐up studies, the paper proposes a research focus on everyday practices and the interactions of diverse control measures. It sets out several fruitful methodological pathways, both the well‐established approaches of ethnography and Actor‐Network Theory and the more novel approaches of investigating numbers as communicative acts or as dramaturgical performances.
Boundary spanners and calculative practices
This paper questions to what extent particular calculative practices used for inter‐organisational decision‐making help or hinder boundary spanners meet performativity ideals. It uses programmatic rationalities of government as a framework to study reciprocity between them and the conditions of performativity. Empirical data were collected from healthcare commissioning spaces of English National Health Service (NHS). Data triangulation was achieved through documentary analysis, data collected through interviews, and observation notes taken in local commissioning meetings and national conferences. Findings revealed an apparent lack of reciprocity between programmatic rationality and calculative practices surrounding the commissioning activities of boundary spanners. As a consequence, in local commissioning situations boundary spanners with formal roles used calculative practices differently than semi‐formal boundary spanners. Unlike their formal counterparts, who used mainly accounting information in their calculative practices, semi‐formal boundary spanners incorporated non‐accounting information and devised alternative calculative practices. In addition, while formal boundary spanners on NHS Committees used calculative practices in maintaining clear boundaries between commissioning and provider organisations, semi‐formal boundary spanners made use of the data of both parties in order to reach inter organisational decisions. The study has three main contributions. First, it differentiates boundary spanners and explains differences in their interaction with calculative practices. Second, it introduces the concept of reciprocity to inter‐organisational studies in accounting. Third, it shows how conditions of performativity reflected in micro‐settings influenced how semi‐formal boundary spanners used calculative practices (and other supplementary information) to achieve performance ideals of government programmes.
Making the user useful? How translation processes managerialize voice in public organizations
One of the most pervasive topics in public management discussions in recent decades is the notion of user orientation. More than ever, external stakeholders expect public organizations to “get closer” to users and to treat citizens as knowledgeable consumers of public services with a view and a voice. Existing literature highlights how, through a wide range of calculative practices, information gathered from and about public service users is assembled into descriptions of organizational activity that are useful for managers in addressing issues of surveillance and internal control as well as legitimation. In our multiple case study of hospitals and prisons in Germany, we introduce a two‐step model of translation for explaining how user voice is transformed into management objects, which are then further translated into organizationally “useful” information. In doing so, we make three contributions to further our understanding of how user views are formatted to organizational activity and put to use by managers in the public sector. First, we developed a model of translation that highlights how user voices and the prospect of user orientation are enacted across diverse organizational contexts. Second, we found that different types of organizations deploy distinct methods of accounting, which nevertheless make user feedback useful in similar ways: to develop information that helps construct an image of performance, gain financial leverage, and enact compliance. Third, we found that in addition to quantitative forms of accounting, narrative accounting techniques played important roles in making users “useful” in public organizations.
The shaping of public services through calculative practices: The roles of accountants, citizens, professionals, and politicians
This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and within public service organizations. The papers in the special issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calculative practices intervene in public services, and thus come to affect the experiences of such actors, offering important perspectives on how the latter act to resist, reshape, redefine, and change those very practices, or strategically and tactically use (or avoid the use of) accounting to impact the ways in which services are defined and delivered.
Calculating pay in Swedish schools: Accounting, performativity, and misfires
This is a study of individual differentiated pay (IDP) for teachers in Sweden. We regard IDP as part of the observed accountingization of professional work. Our aim is to contribute to the understanding of accounting as a performative calculative device through the study of how performance is made an element of individual pay. As we sought to answer “How are merits and performance of professionals turned into a set IDP?” we observed the ways in which IDP had diverse performative consequences, which made the connection between performance and merit less influential in the process of setting wages. We contribute to the theorizing of accounting as a performative practice by introducing two propositions that indicate the importance of considering the extent to which accounting is turned into a dominant narrative and the extent to which the operations can be visualized in a relevant, stable manner. The propositions are the result of the approach to include visualizations as a focal dimension of performativity. The concept stresses the importance of recognizing the prerequisites of relevance and correspondence.
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Financial Accountability & Management
Pick and Roll: Expanded roles for a state auditor
This paper proposes a theoretical typology for categorizing the multiple roles played by public auditing today, containing four audit modes: classic administrative audit, policy analysis audit, values‐based audit, and public agenda audit. While some specific aspects of these functions have been studied in other contexts, to the best of my knowledge they have not yet been examined and articulated as a whole. Using examples from Israel, this paper seeks to bridge this gap in the literature by presenting this evolution, offering a theoretical framework for identifying and discussing its new scope, and their implications both for the future of the state audit and for democracy.
Financial Accountability & Management