The Logics of Hybrid Accountability: When the State, the Market, and Professionalism Interact

• Author: Avishai Benish
• DOI: 10.1177/0002716220965905
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020

ANNALS, AAPSS, 691, September 2020 295

DOI: 10.1177/0002716220965905

The Logics of

Hybrid

Accountability:

When the State,

the Market, and

Professionalism

Interact

By

AVISHAI BENISH

965905ANN The Annals of the American AcademyThe Logics of Hybrid Accountability

research-article2020

The delivery of public services increasingly operates

under hybrid accountability regimes, but we have

much to learn about how these regimes interrelate. I

develop a framework for systematic analysis of hybrid

public, market, and professional accountability arrange-

ments, looking at the compatibility of their content,

steering mechanisms, and relationships. The analysis is

informed and illustrated by empirical studies on

accountability in welfare state services, which offer

evidence on hybrid accountability arrangements. The

article concludes by discussing the interplay between

accountability regimes and the conditions in which they

undermine or reinforce each other. I argue that com-

patibility between regimes depends on the content of

accountability rather than on the accountability mecha-

nisms, and I highlight the importance of the trust

between the parties entering into accountability rela-

tions and the proximity of their institutional logics.

Keywords: regulatory welfare state; accountability;

new public management; social policy;

social administration; social services

With the rise of the regulatory welfare

state (RWS), welfare services increasingly

operate under hybrid—public market and social—

forms of accountability. Hybrid accountability

results from the blurring and shifting of bounda-

ries between these accountability regimes,

mixing actors, logics, norms, and mechanisms

(Benish and Mattei 2019). Such hybridity is

evident, for instance, when nonstate agencies

and workers are subject to public-law require-

ments of legality and fairness or when public sector

agencies and workers are subject to performance-

based management. Hybrid accountability is, of

Avishai Benish is an assistant professor (tenured) at the

Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social

Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His

fields of expertise are social law and administration,

and his main research is on regulation and governance

reforms in welfare states.

Correspondence: avishai.benish@mail.huji.ac.il

296 THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

course, not new in welfare state services (Clarke and Newman 1997), but hybrid-

ization has radically accelerated with the trends of “new public management”

(NPM), collaborative governance, and various other regulatory reforms in social

welfare (Gilbert 2013; Levi-Faur and Gilad 2004; Christensen and Lægreid

2017). For quite some time now, scholars have acknowledged the increasingly

hybrid nature of accountability (see, e.g., Scott 2001; Halliday 2004), but we are

still far from understanding how multiple accountability regimes relate to one

another.

Against this backdrop, this article seeks to develop a conceptual framework for

hybrid accountability arrangements and the interaction between them in the

context of the RWS. It does so by identifying the prevailing logics of the various

accountability regimes and assessing the factors influencing their interaction.

While existing literature tends to focus on instances of tension and conflict, the

article focuses on the compatibility between regimes, including cases of mutual

reinforcement. The conceptual frame developed in the article is informed and

illustrated by the empirical literature on social administration, which offers a

wealth of empirical evidence on the ways hybrid accountability plays out in the

field.

The article is structured as follows. The first section develops an analytical

framework for understanding the logics of accountability regimes. The second

section defines the hybridity of accountability and creates a framework for ana-

lyzing the level of compatibility between regimes in terms of their content,

mechanisms, and relational aspects. The article then systematically explores how

public, market, and professional accountability and their respective underlying

logics relate to one another in dyadic hybrids. The article concludes with an over-

view of the compatibility between accountability regimes and discussing whether

and under what conditions they undermine or reinforce each other.

The Logics of Accountability

The term accountability has leapt to public prominence in the last three decades

(Mulgan 2003). The core of accountability is agency theory. Simply stated, agents

are required to give an ex-post account of their actions to others for whom they

perform tasks or who are affected by the tasks they perform (Bovens, Goodin,

and Schillemans 2014). In an effort to unpack the building blocks of these agency

relations, Mashaw (2006) lists six questions, the answers to which compose the

process of accountability: (1) who is accountable (2) to whom, (3) about what, (4)

through what processes, (5) by what standards of appraisal, and (6) leading to

what consequences. In addition, Mashaw suggests grouping accountability

regimes, usually analyzed separately, into three distinctive types: public regimes,

market regimes, and social regimes. According to Mashaw, each type of regime

answers the questions of accountability differently in terms of the normative

framework and the organizational practices underlying the accountability

relations.