Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

The third sector plays a critical role in addressing societal challenges, supporting vulnerable communities, and bridging gaps in public service provision. Managing third-sector organizations (TSOs) has become increasingly complex due to financial constraints, evolving governance structures, and heightened accountability demands, particularly during crises. Excluding this front-end, scene-setting paper, this Special Issue brings together five papers that apply innovative frameworks to examine participatory governance, public/third-sector partnerships, performance reporting, resilience, and membership dynamics within TSOs. The papers emphasize the importance of inclusive governance, strategic collaboration, and adaptability in enhancing social inclusion, sustainability, and organizational resilience. It also provides practical recommendations for policymakers and practitioners and identifies opportunities for future research to address unresolved questions in the field.

This article takes its point of departure from an article by Kurunmäki, who illustrated how medical professionals in Finland adopted accounting techniques and practices in their roles. She, therefore, argued that the medical profession had become hybridized. Jacobs, however, questions this “hybridization thesis” and offers an alternative explanation, suggesting that the medical profession—at least in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy—was polarized. According to this view, accounting techniques and practices were adopted only by a subgroup of medical staff, leaving the fundamental values and practices of the wider profession largely unchanged. We revisit this debate through a semi-systematic review of literature from the fields of accounting, public sector studies, management and organizational studies, and healthcare research. We systematize, analyze, and discuss key insights from the different fields. The review is organized into two main streams: research that supports and extends the hybridization thesis and research that supports and extends the polarization thesis. The first stream is further divided into four themes that emerged from our analysis: hybrid roles and identities; hybrids as knowledge brokers and facilitators of organizational change; budgeting, accounting, and hybridization; and hybridization as practice. The article concludes with suggested avenues for future research.

This article applies institutional logics to examine the implementation of a performance-funding programme for Danish public schools. The programme introduced a potential bonus aimed at incentivizing improved educational outcomes for academically low-performing students. We investigate the implementation of the programme through decoupling, compromising, and differentiation between an incumbent educational logic and the programme's intruding economic logic, drawing on a qualitative study of a Danish municipality's responses using semi-structured interviews with administrators, school managers, and teachers. The findings demonstrate how a programme is translated into organizational practice, where solving some tensions induces new ones. The article contributes by highlighting different enactments of responses to tensions based on divergent interpretations of accounting technologies and institutional logics. It shows how an accounting technology goes through different translations from policy to influencing front-line personnel and how responses can involve compromising and manipulation as well as unsuccessful decoupling.

Performance audits have become increasingly important across the world. Scholars know that a variety of practices are incorporated within performance audits and have mapped this diversity. However, few quantitative studies examine performance auditing as a practice. This study fills that gap. By analyzing the published performance audit documentation of the UK National Audit Office (NAO), the study explores the influences of governmental change and crises behind changes in a supreme audit institution's performance audit. It also examines whether performance audits are diverse by examining the language used by the auditors. The study provides evidence that neither crises nor changes of government have a significant effect on the overall extent of performance audit reporting. However, over time, the study does find variation in the themes of performance audit reports, with more financial themes and fewer performance themes after 2010.

Addressing “wicked” governance challenges requires participatory processes that engage diverse perspectives, embrace contestation, and foster innovative solutions. This article examines social and environmental reporting (SER) as a context for exploring how participatory governance can be designed to enable pluralistic engagement. Drawing on critical dialogic accounting and accountability (CDAA), it introduces agonistic participatory governance as a practical framework for challenging hegemonic narratives and rethinking the role of SER. Through an empirical investigation of the SER dialogue—an agonistic mini-public designed to bring together participants with conflicting perspectives on the topic—this study demonstrates how participatory spaces can be constructed to embrace contestation and transformative engagement. Using Q methodology to map the “conflict constellation,” the SER dialogue was structured around the principles of conflict-oriented selection and agonistic procedures. The participants were encouraged to articulate their differences, critically reflect on assumptions, and question dominant narratives, such as the business-case framing of SER. Three key transformative actions are identified: establishing common ground, confronting divergent perspectives, and rethinking narratives. These insights demonstrate how participatory governance can foster pluralism, disrupt entrenched narratives, and reimagine accountability. By advancing CDAA research and offering practical guidance for designing agonistic spaces, this study highlights the potential of participatory governance to address complex issues and drive social transformation.

This article is principally an agenda-setting piece based on a personal-critical reflection from someone who has a long history of being involved in the third sector as both a researcher and as someone who has been engaged in steering its governance processes (regarding policy and regulation development). It highlights key third-sector research that has featured in FAM since its inception in 1985 (“reflections”) and outlines research ideas (“directions”) as an encouragement to researchers to focus on third-sector organizations (TSOs). It argues that theoretically based, empirically grounded, rigorous research and critical reflection in the third sector are vitally important, having the potential to contribute to the protection, health, and growth of the valuable social capital that is generated by TSOs.

In the face of stiffening sector competition and reduced government funding, universities in many countries increasingly seek to diversify their revenue. One prominent way employed by universities to achieve revenue diversification is the commercialization of research knowledge. However, knowledge commercialization could be regarded as a risky enterprise for many institutions, especially those lacking the capacity to support commercial activity. To investigate these issues, we examine the impact of knowledge commercialization on the audit fees charged to UK universities. Using a panel dataset covering 2010/11–2019/20, we find that knowledge commercialization is positively associated with university audit fees, indicating that auditors may charge more to compensate for the greater workloads and risks associated with auditing universities with more commercial activity. Further analysis shows that the positive commercialization–fees relationship is weaker in universities that spend more on research and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, suggesting that auditors perceive knowledge commercialization activities as carrying lower risk if the university has more capacity for undertaking research that can be commercialized. We conclude by discussing the implications of what we identify as a growing divergence among universities in their ability to commercialize research knowledge as perceived by auditors.