Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

Placing beneficiaries at the center of governance and accountability arrangements in charities is widely acknowledged as critical, however, engaging these individuals in a meaningful way represents a fundamental challenge. Mechanisms to facilitate this remain underdeveloped and there is limited understanding of how this can be operationalized within the governance structures of charities, particularly in relation to marginalized groups. This paper contributes to filling this gap by undertaking a longitudinal case study of a Scottish human rights-based charity working with individuals with learning difficulties, exploring how beneficiary participation can be operationalized in practice. A framework is developed which integrates critical dialogic accountability with coproduction principles, providing a unique perspective on how participatory governance can foster greater social inclusion of individuals with learning difficulties.

COVID-19 radically changed how public services (activities of general interest) are pursued and administered. The search for resilient models has prompted public administration to test new regulatory approaches and to involve the third sector in the provision of primary services. This study investigates the sustainability and capacity of these models, specifically the implementation of a co-planning and co-design model aimed at measuring the possible creation of value and achieving common objectives. On the basis of an analysis of the development of the Turin Fast Track City project, the study employs a longitudinal method to identify not only the sustainability of the model but also new effective performance measurement tools, such as SIA analysis and integrated social accounting using financial and non-financial elements. The study also highlights critical elements aimed at supporting future investigations.

This article focuses on explaining management control under post-new public management (NPM). Drawing on the lessons from a case study, the article aims to advance the discussion of what post-NPM, as a new governance innovation, is and what problems practitioners encounter when they try to engage in post-NPM–oriented governance. The study reports the transformation of both management and control at the Swedish Public Employment Service Agency (PES) with the help of the framework of enabling and coercive control. The case study demonstrates how practitioners encountered problems when trying to balance enabling practices with hierarchical accountability. In the case of PES, the study shows how the organization failed to find this balance and how the problem with reduced hierarchical accountability gradually shifted the calculative practices and slowly reimposed performance measures, result-orientation, and hierarchical control. The article contributes to the contemporary public sector accounting discussion on how and to what extent we can move beyond NPM, both empirically by following a public organization's attempt to engage with post-NPM, and theoretically by theorizing post-NPM as a new government innovation and placing greater emphasis on how accounting practices need to adapt to a post-NPM–oriented governance.

This article examines the organizational-level implementation of UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education institutions, with a particular emphasis on the roles of rankings in this context. Drawing on translation theory and a case study of a Saudi Arabian university, the article shows that rankings played a central role in motivating our case organization to implement SDGs and in navigating the implementation process. The article moreover shows that the reliance of rankings on self-reported data allowed for gaming and manipulation, as the case organization was, for example, able to present politically compliant staff associations as evidence for trade union activity, and a segregated college for female students as evidence for the empowerment of women. The article, however, also argues that the flexibility this reliance on self-reported data affords higher education institutions can play a crucial role in adjusting the transnational SDG framework to the political, social, and institutional realities of the many different contexts in which it is implemented. Without this flexibility, the entire SDG framework, including the genuine sustainability advances it brought about, might have been rejected outright in the Saudi Arabian context.

Social accounting practices attribute value to an organization's activities beyond traditional economic conceptions of success. In assessing the merit of such practices, we argue that it is helpful to extend our analytical focus beyond questions of what is evaluated and who evaluates to how valuations are performed. Social accounting literature has already explored a crucial aspect of the “how question,” emphasizing the need to widen stakeholder input and engage in agonistic democratic deliberation beyond applying technical expertise. We extend these insights by drawing attention to an important dimension of the how question that remains underexplored, namely, where such deliberation can or should be applied and explaining why this matters. In doing so, we disclose the complexity and messiness of social accounting processes, as well as their normative and political significance. We deploy political discourse theory to highlight the virtues of focusing on where value is constructed along the social accounting chain, illustrating our contribution with examples drawn from our experience conducting a Social Return on Investment (SROI) for a not-for-profit organization. We present and unpack key decision-junctures in the SROI process, demonstrating the plural and pluralizing character of these “moments of judgment” by showing how contestability and normativity enter the valuation process, aspects that are often obfuscated by an over-reliance on, and the rhetoric of, the technical aspects of quantification and monetization. By foregrounding the contingency and subjectivity embedded in valuation practices, we argue there is a need to navigate agonistically, deliberatively, and pragmatically their plural and complex character.

In this article, we study how management control shapes dialogs among actors with different perspectives on the development of infrastructure in Sweden; that is, situations and events where management control “enters” dialogs and influences them. Building on agonistic pluralism and conducting a qualitative study, we identify two roles that management control has in shaping dialogs. One is that management controls attach differences to the dialog, and the other is that management reduces the scope of the dialog. These themes also highlight facilitating and shutting down pluralism and ideas of public value. This study contributes to the previous research that has called for taking pluralism seriously and exploring the role of management control in relation to public values, pluralism, and dialogs. This article provides an understanding of two roles that management control has in shaping dialogs: How ideas of different public values are facilitated and shut down, and how management control contributes to facilitating and shutting down pluralism.

In recent years, public organizations have come under increasing pressure to implement comprehensive risk management (RM) systems that are based on international frameworks and standards. However, little is known about whether different countries have addressed this issue in their regulatory strategies and how they have done so. To address this gap, this study conducts a cross-country analysis and introduces and applies an analytical framework to compare the different RM approaches adopted by the central governments of France, Germany, and Italy. This comparison sheds light on the regulatory landscape in the three largest countries in the European Union and reveals the diverse RM frameworks with varying focuses, drivers, designs, and levels of integration. Although each country has unique nuances in its approaches, commonality is the primary perception of risk as a threat. This stance, although understandable in the context of financial risks, calls for a shift toward viewing risk as an opportunity, thus promoting a balanced approach that goes beyond mere compliance.