Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

This article contributes to our understanding of the use of counter accounting in social movements, through consideration of Bakhtinian dialogics as a theoretical framing. We explore counter and dialogic accounting in a significant socio-political conflict in the city of Sheffield, UK. Our case covers a public–private partnership (PPP) highway maintenance scheme entailing conflict over a tree-felling scheme in the city. The city-based case had an organized and focused campaign, aligning a plurality of interests in opposition to the tree-felling. This coordinated campaign opposed local authority actions that sought ostensibly to save money. Our study shows how local activist groups produced dialogic counter-accounts of the symbolic and ecological importance of street trees, elevating the environment and community concerns above Sheffield City Council's monologic focus on money and contracts. The campaign's success in halting the tree-felling scheme also helped foster conditions for broader grassroots-led democratic reform in the city. Research on the city context vis-à-vis counter and dialogic accounting is rare.

To reduce information asymmetry and maintain public trust in charities, they are strongly encouraged to communicate their good work, with many jurisdictions considering whether and how to regulate performance reporting. New Zealand and the United Kingdom are early developers of new governance-type performance reporting requirements—using co-regulatory tools to enhance the regulators’ legitimacy and thus, charities’ compliance. We explore how this regulation has developed, framing our analysis with Kane's regulatory dialectics, which argue that regulation is developed through a series of repeated, cyclical (often antagonistic) interactions between regulators and regulatees. We find that new governance-type performance reporting regulation exemplifies the stages of Kane's regulatory dialectics but that important differences associated with new governance regulation led to a more partnered and less adversarial process. When repeated interactions are facilitated through co-regulation, regulatee representation on regulatory bodies, formal and informal interactions, and regulatee advocacy for regulatory developments, the boundaries between regulator and regulatee become blurred. This impacts significantly on the resulting regulation and potentially improves acceptance of (and compliance with) mandatory requirements. We propose a model of new governance regulatory dialectics that can support practitioners in developing new governance regulation, and further research and theorization of this important area.

This literature review aims to highlight the themes and the developments of public sector accounting (PSA) research over the last five decades (1970–2019), analyzing 2187 papers though a combination of bibliometric (co-word) analysis and qualitative insights into the selected papers. The review shows that PSA scholarship has grown in significance over the last few decades giving rise to a vibrant and variegated scientific community, flourishing at the intersection among but also increasingly spanning across, different disciplines. Moreover, it reveals that traditional themes such as budgeting, performance measurement, and accountability remained at the core of the literature across most of the decades, attracting attention from multiple communities and journals. Other themes, such as accruals accounting, accounting standards, reporting, and auditing experienced varied interest over the decades and reflected the interests of more specialized, or “niche” communities of scholarship. By looking at the trends of PSA over time, the paper shows how accounting systems and calculative practices have come to reflect and affect the multiple values and the need for quantifying techniques of an ever-evolving public sector. A call for more attention toward accounting for multiple and plural values is advanced, with suggestions for future research avenues.

Membership organizations rely on maintaining and growing their membership base, both for financial stability and to allow them to increase their impact. UK service clubs are one such kind of membership organization that has suffered a decline in membership in more recent years and is seeking to address this to maintain their presence. However, membership recruitment and retention have proven problematic for these organizations, in particular, recruitment and retention of younger members to ensure the continuity of the organization. This paper utilizes a theoretical framework based on the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in order to conceptualize the issues around membership and public image within the theoretical constructs of identity, ideology, and desire. This is combined with a qualitative methodological framework utilizing 42 semistructured interviews with service club members and external stakeholders (donors, beneficiaries, and local government representatives). The results of this research found that although current members profess to desire younger members to join, they are reluctant to change their organization to facilitate this. Instead, icons and rituals combine to form an image of the organization that is unappealing to younger prospective members, relegating their desire to join to an almost purely symbolic act. This, therefore, carries implications for service clubs and their membership, especially when considering the level of engagement that potential younger members would be prepared to offer in the future. The strong ideological forces at play within service clubs mean that they will continue to appeal to a relatively narrow membership profile (one that sees their current operation aligned to an organizational “ego ideal” that is symbolically constructed and maintained).

The special issue critically explores how public sector financial management can support the achievement of sustainable development and how it can act in the service of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It aims to encourage further research in the field, while also drawing on findings from the eight papers included, which touch on important areas of research in the nexus between public financial management and the SDGs and specifically: (1) Reporting on SDGs: This is an area that deserves further attention, even moving beyond the theories already adopted to investigate the topic. (2) Embedding sustainability into operations: Sustainable development requires the adoption of methods and tools that can enhance sustainability-related action at the public sector entity level. (3) SDGs and calculative practices: The use of calculative practices in SDGs reporting can help to take a meaningful step from a symbolic to a substantive approach to sustainability, but the unintended consequences of performativity in promoting sustainable development need to be further investigated. (4) Environmental reporting and SDGs: While environmental reporting is a dominant theme in sustainable development, further research on climate change and environmental disclosure in the public sector is required. In addition, the special issue draws attention to some further dimensions: the governance for SDGs achievement, the assurance of SDGs reporting, and the creation of citizen-driven demand for reporting on SDGs achievement in a digital environment.

Drawing on Guy Debord's concept of the spectacle, this article aims to extend our understanding of the way in which certain non-governmental organizations (NGOs) spectacularize their performance in the context of disaster situations and the continued co-existence of a multiplicity of accountabilities, with reference to the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. Data for the study were gathered through semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The findings of the study demonstrate how the voices of many Nepalese NGOs involved in the relief, recovery, and rehabilitation efforts following the 2015 earthquakes remained unheard and how they were forced to compromise their felt responsibilities by having to adhere to the control-oriented and accounting-based requirements imposed by the government and funders. Such requirements put certain NGOs, which were established to pursue political and personal goals, in a position to benefit from the situation, allowing them to obfuscate the ground level reality, for instance by manipulating the number of beneficiaries and geographical areas served, showcasing their performance on social media, and facilitating pseudo-ceremonies and participation. The spectacle created by NGOs was oppressive, exacerbating inequalities in aid distribution and excluding certain groups of beneficiaries from the relief, recovery, and rehabilitation efforts. The key contribution of the study lies in illustrating how both wider society and NGOs’ stakeholders have been relegated to the role of passive spectator–consumers, as they accepted and consumed the NGO-led representation.

This paper examines the pivotal role played by counter accounts in reshaping public sentiment and disrupting the power and reach of hegemonic discourse. While prior scholarship has largely focused on the emergence of counter accounts as alternative perspectives to dominant and institutionalised narratives, we highlight the prevalence and significant influence of institutionalised public narratives, which tend to become deeply ingrained in the collective public consciousness of society. These narratives often go unquestioned and unchallenged. Consequently, when attempting to reshape public discourse and people's perspectives on a particular issue, the focus is often not on countering the content of the hegemonic account itself, but on how to challenge the widespread acceptance and power that this narrative holds in various forms that limit the potential for alternative viewpoints to gain traction. Our empirical investigation centres on counter accounts that emerged within the ‘Together for Yes’ (TfY) and Repeal the Eighth campaigns in Ireland where we investigated how counter accounts that draw on the private experiences of women's reproductive rights engendered public solidarity in addressing deeply personal issues and transgressed the prevalence of institutionalised narratives on abortion. Drawing on the insights of bell hooks (1989; 1990; 1992; 1994), we find that this takes place in the form of stories and storytelling, that do not directly confront or deconstruct the narratives promoted by dominant institutions but instead aim to address the underlying dynamics and consequences generated by the very existence of these institutionalised narratives within the public sphere. hooks' work underscores the transformative potential of storytelling, which immerses audiences in the intricacies of narratives, fostering perceptual shifts and challenging preconceived notions. Our findings highlight stories and storytelling as a potent tool for countering the omnipresence of hegemonic discourse by specifically challenging the dynamics of silence, dehumanisation, stigma, and shame perpetuated by institutionalised narratives concerning women's reproductive rights.