Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

Building perceptions of trustworthiness that encourage donors to give is critical for nonprofit organizations that depend on charitable giving. Several studies focused on the disclosure of financial and performance information to foster public trust and help donors to make giving decisions. Drawing from stewardship theory, this study explores how additional content dimensions of a more relational nature—including appreciation for the support received and willingness to dialog with donors—might be combined with financial and performance dimensions to design effective online disclosure in the view of nonprofits. By focusing on the viewpoint of European community foundations and using the configurational approach of qualitative comparative analysis, we found that information about fundraising campaigns is deemed must-have content to discharge online. However, this information alone is not considered to be enough; to retain current donors or attract new ones, it must be combined properly with disclosures demonstrating gratitude to and engagement with donors alongside organizational finances and performance.

Over the last few decades, neoliberal, managerial, reforms have dominated the university sector in a number of different countries. Calculative practices, including performance measures and indicators, have spread and targets, in terms of research outputs and increasing student numbers in order to generate “profit”, have become the norm, despite the many voices seeing this as often clashing with the mission of universities to create knowledge and contribute to social development. The paper provides an overview of the changing focus on how universities have been managed over time and, at the same time, of the emergence and measurementof Public Value themes in the university sector. A future research agenda is proposed for those interested in the study of the university sector, together with possibleresearch questions to further this area.

This paper examines financial cooperatives (credit unions) in Ireland and their response to COVID-19. The paper offers two contributions. The first is the Cooperative Resilience Framework, which highlights the importance of iterative, heuristic responses in building capabilities that enable routine-based responses. These responses, in turn, avoid and absorb the effects of disruption in subsequent similar crises. The second contribution is empirical, demonstrating the how of resilience by offering a better understanding of how the credit unions’ collective actions created dynamic, agile responses that helped them to “bounce forward” after the crisis. Key themes identified include agility, strong social relationships, and decentralized decision-making (empowerment).

This paper examines the challenges posed to third sector organizations by major external crises that from time to time beset national and global communities. In so doing, it unpacks the multiple characteristics and complexities of concepts and related issues involved in organizational crisis management and resilience. This reveals the importance of shared sensemaking, issue identification, response types and implementation, organizational coping and adaptation, exploiting strategic opportunities, and conditioners of organizational resilience. Related insights are drawn from selected empirical studies involving non-profit organizational crisis responses to a range of major crisis events. Accountability and management control implications are induced, and a relevant ongoing agenda for accounting research is presented.

Prior studies have examined various economic, environmental, and social impacts of the London congestion charge (LCC). However, few studies have investigated how the Transport for London (TfL) managed the LCC in all stages of its policy. Without active, strategic management of policies, stakeholders affected may doubt the policies’ legitimacy and reduce policy effectiveness. Thus, examining the means utilized to achieve effective policy management is critical and can potentially influence the development and management of future policies. This study adapts Mitchell et al.’s stakeholder typology to study how the TfL, as part of the management of, and as the dominant stakeholder in, environmental regulations in London, strategically managed the LCC via their own efforts to exert power, establish legitimacy, and claim urgency. Relying on Yin, we analyze publicly available data to show how the TfL actively managed the LCC to ensure its sustainability as policy. The TfL primarily used tactics to maintain and enhance the LCC's legitimacy with authoritative power and fears of unproven urgency to influence other stakeholders. Results have practical implications for policymakers contemplating policy reforms and shed additional light on less-discussed latent factors regarding policy management. This study contributes to the literature by applying stakeholder theory to the domain of policy reform, administration, and management. Our findings have policy implications as policymakers may benefit from learning the tactics examined in this study to assess their policy management and administration. Lastly, through our discussion and conclusions, we reflect on our findings to encourage research on policy management.

The ways in which a common understanding of environmental challenges is established among nonprofit leaders are not clearly presented in the literature, despite the importance of such understanding as an antecedent of organizational resilience. In response to this research gap, this paper seeks to identify how such an alignment is facilitated. We use a qualitative research approach and investigate seven international nonprofit organizations whose leadership is aligned on environmental challenges. The data collection is twofold. First, leaders of these organizations, being the board chair, one board member, and the managerial executive, respond to closed and open-ended survey questions. Second, we analyze organizational documents of the participating nonprofits. This includes for example their bylaws, codes of conduct, and strategic plans. Our results indicate that transparency, clarity, flexibility, and quality relationships among the leadership are key interaction characteristics associated with leadership alignment. Good board chair leadership and board gender balance are crucial personal characteristics. The present paper provides insights to academics as well as practitioners who aim to enhance cohesion of their leadership's understanding of environmental challenges.

This paper explores how arts and arts-based initiatives (ABIs) are embedded in a non-arts organization with a pronounced imprint on efficiency.

When two unconnected and distant fields of activity coexist and collaborate, this is known in academia as hybridity. Scholars in hybridity are interested in studying the tension that emerges from the blending of otherwise distant fields and the coping actions that give stability over time. Conversely, studies on ABIs have mostly overlooked the tension arising from the coupling of arts practices and efficiency practices viewed in a long-term perspective.

To address this issue, we conducted a process research study on a government agency with a strong efficiency mindset and a focus on standardized procedures which had decided to promote its arts collection. The analysis was based on semi-structured interviews, participant observations, and archive data and focused on the tension and actions taken by the unit running the arts collection and the rest of the government agency. Our findings identified two types of actions, instant and enduring actions, which can be deployed with diverse temporality and by people with different hierarchical positions to navigate the tensions arising from art being incorporated within a non-arts organization over time.

This paper explores how a country's constitutionally imposed democracy in an academic performance evaluation system was designed and practiced. Building upon agonistic democracy and deliberative democracy perspectives, a qualitative inductive case study in a Vietnamese public university involved 52 interviews, direct observations, and the analysis of archival documents. The findings revealed three dimensions of democracy in the university's performance evaluation system, namely, democratic context, democratic discourse, and democratic outcomes. The university enforced democracy in its performance evaluation system for academics in line with the country's constitutional obligation. In such an explicit democratic context, there happened democratic discourse (debating academics’ performance in public forums) and implicit discourse (informal social interactions). The outcome of this democracy at the practice level resulted from temporary consensus supported by shared cultural values within the country's socio-political context with an understanding that it will change as with any change in the macro or micro contexts. These findings contribute to the literature by providing insights into how individuals pursue democracy in an accounting tool legally built to promote democracy through their multiple voices and collective wisdom. Thus, democratizing accounting technologies and processes, such as an academic performance evaluation system, can effectively promote democracy in multi-cultural workplaces across the globe.

We explore how a management control initiative travels across and is translated within organizations—from the decision motives for adoption or rejection to the subsequent decision motives for sustaining or abandoning the control—through the lens of diffusion theory. Our empirical case is the journey of activity-based funding of hospitals across 21 Swedish healthcare authorities. We develop a framework in which the abandonment or sustainment of a management control is explained by the interplay between the decision motive underlying the adoption and the propensity to continuously adapt it in response to new organizational goals and circumstances. This propensity is determined by fits and misfits between organizational characteristics and properties of the control.

This research aims to contribute to the debate on fraud on public funds and the work that public auditors perform on this important topic, providing a useful analysis for government officials concerned about accountability, good governance, and transparency. This article presents a retrospective analysis of the European Court of Auditors’ (ECA) role in combating and preventing fraud. Using innovative research tools such as the Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner lexicon and other quantitative and qualitative research methods, evidence is found that ECA fraud audits reach a more negative tone in their conclusions than in the rest of the audits and that their audit recommendations on fraud are accepted to a lesser degree than the rest. Although in recent years the ECA has taken a more active role regarding fraud and stirring the public debate on this topic, its work is still hampered by its non-jurisdictional statute. The results obtained contribute to the literature on fraud in the public sector by bringing empirical evidence on public sector fraud audit with data of an under-researched and unique Supreme Audit Institution. This article opens up new avenues for future research and has practical implications for practitioners by offering them insights on their role on the issue, thus helping them to address some areas more prone to be affected by fraud.