Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic cut across geographical, sectorial, and policy boundaries and imposed difficult health, economic, and social challenges. Among many learnings, after the 2007–2008 global financial crisis and the austerity period that followed it, the economic and health crises forged by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 offer an important experience to make local governments (LGs) more financially resilient and ready to deal with similar shocks.

This paper builds on a recent framework to investigate the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic on LG financial vulnerability looking at both contingent and systemic aspects. It addresses the need for a multicountry perspective on the effects of the pandemic and responds to calls to test existing models. Seven countries were chosen to represent different administrative contexts and traditions to understand what factors impact the local level in a time of crisis. Results demonstrate that not only contingent aspects but also systemic factors and the initial level of financial vulnerability influenced the responses to the pandemic, confirming findings about the importance of initial conditions and “path dependency” by previous studies.

This study explores the interpretations of a recently implemented value-based healthcare (VBHC) approach within a Danish healthcare region. We examine managerial perceptions of VBHC and how it seeks to balance quality and cost while incorporating patient perspectives. Our research involves interviews with hospital managers at different organizational levels, where we delve into their explanations of how they approach VBHC. Applying institutional logics, our case study reveals the complexities inherent in public healthcare management's understanding of integrating patient perspectives. We find that at the regional level, VBHC guidelines primarily emphasize quality indicators, suggesting a strategic focus on quality over finances due to the absence of cost guidelines. Consequently, we identify a unified accentuated willingness among managers to transcend the traditional focus on productivity associated with New Public Management. In this context, department managers highlight intuitive decision-making approaches and innovative initiatives, which are decoupled from cost information. This decoupling is attributed to a lack of financial expertise at the department level. These managers rely heavily on notions of appropriateness in their reflections on VBHC. On a department level, the term “value” is interpreted as representing the patient perspective, rather than being solely a monetary value of outcomes. Although the latter is often indirectly embedded in decision-making processes, we posit that nuanced aspects of decision-making and the collective logics mobilized at various levels of hospital management, particularly in relation to VBHC, remain underexplored areas in the accounting literature.

This Special Issue is based on a selection of papers initially presented at the conference on “Resilience and the Third Sector” (Institute of Public Sector Accounting Research, University of Edinburgh, November 2022). The third sector is pervasive in most societies and makes a distinctive and widely-recognized contribution to the public good by building social capital, frequently affording a foundation for social cohesiveness. However, it is a fragile sector that is significantly affected by crises (the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune). These have the potential to curtail the capacity of third-sector organizations (TSOs) to deliver societal benefits and, in the most extreme cases, even threaten their survival. Given this, the resilience of TSOs (albeit this term has multiple layers and manifold meanings) is critical. This paper explores a range of connotations linked to third-sector resilience and explores contemporary evidence (including the papers in this Special Issue) as to how the sector identifies, manages, and learns from crises. In addition, it provides a brief outline research agenda as a basis for encouraging researchers to focus on resilience in TSOs and enhance knowledge. It is argued that more rigorous, evidence-based research of this nature has the potential to positively influence practice in the sector, as well as policy formulation by government and others who steer TSOs.

Sustainability is a critical societal aim, and local governments (LGs) play an important role in fostering sustainability, as the implementation of the global aims set by the United Nations—namely, the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs offer novel accounting, reporting, and management perspectives for LGs. The objective of the study is to understand the role of the accounting–management nexus which is needed to institutionalize sustainability in LG practices. We adopted an institutional work perspective to investigate how actors at the field, organizational, and suborganizational levels of LGs can foster sustainability in accounting and management. Based on interviews with managers and other representatives from the 18 largest LGs in Finland, we found that although sustainability integration is still in the early stages and there is considerable heterogeneity in LGs’ handling of sustainability issues, there is clear potential for the simultaneous deployment of different institutional work types. This has positive implications for the institutionalization of sustainability accounting and management practices in LGs, enhancing understanding of how sustainability is fostered in public sector accounting and management by focusing on organizational-level institutional work.

Over the last few decades, new public management reforms have dominated the hospital sectors in a number of European countries. Financial and nonfinancial performance targets have been introduced into most areas of the hospitals in order to stimulate clinical activity and outcome. Performance management has involved challenging tasks for healthcare middle managers due to service complexities and horizontal and vertical lines of accountability. Doctors and nurses are the major professional middle managers, and they are characterized as hybrid managers. The paper argues that interprofessional communication is important for middle managers as mediators between strategic and operational levels in hospitals. The key concept here is interprofessional communication between hybridized professions and how they manage the joint delivery of high-quality healthcare. Two theoretical perspectives of interprofessional communication and performance management are presented and synthesized in a brief discussion on joint leadership to underline the importance of lateral communication in hospitals. The main contribution from this study is the empirical data, which depict the interprofessional differences in communication between groups of middle managers. The doctors are managers by co-working with their colleagues as hybrid managers, whereas nurses tend to become full-time managers and administrators. The study adds knowledge to previous literature as it exemplifies how professionals design their hybrid roles differently to handle competing institutional logics. Consequently, interprofessional communication is an important element in managing clinical performance and patient throughputs.

This paper studies grassroots organizations that provide various forms of support to vulnerable local communities in the United Kingdom in a context of increasing austerity, public sector drawbacks, a lack of funding and extensive monitoring, and evaluative requirements. We focus on the COVID-19 pandemic, which challenged traditional funding relationships. We analyze lived experiences of trust, emotion, and suffering to understand the politics of accountability across the diverse economy. We draw on Gibson-Graham's post-capitalist framework, which insists on the politics of language, the subject, and collective action. In the setting we study, the language of crisis reshaped funding, vulnerable subjectivities emerged to support vulnerable communities, and fragmenting accountabilities were met with attempts to promote collective action and solidarity. We, therefore, contribute to literature in critical accounting and literature focused on the voluntary and community sector by studying a landscape of diverse accountability practices to explore the possibilities that they offer in terms of accounting for non-capitalist organizing.

This paper delves into the discursive recontextualization of new public financial management (NPFM) in the context of peacebuilding, reshaping the dynamics among the donor community, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. Utilizing Fairclough's dialectical relational version of Critical Discourse Analysis (2003, 2013) as a methodological framework, we extend the NPFM literature by broadening our understanding of how diverse discourses—particularly NPFM rooted in neoliberalism and peacebuilding—are brought together in a specific relationship for the purpose of transmission. In addition, this study advances our comprehension of the dialogic nature of NPFM, exploring the extent to which other voices are represented, excluded, or suppressed in the examined texts. The paper sheds light on the role of international agencies, exemplified by the World Bank, in transposing development discourses—a theme explored in previous research. Furthermore, we contribute to the literature by highlighting that the peacebuilding context serves as a space for influential actors, such as donor agencies, to exert their influence.

Charity regulation is increasing internationally, leading to divergent views on what might constitute “better regulation.” The purpose of a charity regulator and appropriate regulation may also be contested. Many modern charity regulators are required to maintain public trust and confidence in charities in order to bolster ongoing charity support from funders and the donating public. Nevertheless, public trust and confidence is precarious. At its nadir, in England and Wales “the person in the street” was deemed more trustworthy than charities, with donations diminishing in the current environment and the charity sector close to crisis. Further, charities contribute to crises when they incite negative media interest in their operations, fail to comply with regulatory filing deadlines, and/or manipulate their accounts. Charity regulators must maintain legitimacy within a changing regulatory space, despite often being resource-constrained themselves. Yet, some suggest regulators could “do more” to increase sector-wide resilience and to increase public trust and confidence. Hence, this raises the question of how charities should be regulated and whether (and how) a regulator could build resilience. We depict charity-sector crises as a vehicular incident and ponder: should the regulator act as a “Guardian Angel” to prevent crises through interventions to build and maintain sectoral resilience, or should it appear postincident as a “Tow Truck” to clear the road for other traffic through closely bounded regulatory action focused on sanctions and deregistration. We address this question by analyzing publicly available regulatory data from the Charity Commission of England and Wales and semistructured interviews, which provide additional “behind the scenes” depth to our analysis and findings. We contribute to literature on charity regulation and expected regulatory responsibilities within a confined but permeable regulatory space.

Digital technologies are changing the ways service users can cocreate value, thus rearranging relations between citizens and governments. However, research from a governance perspective is still in its infancy. Investigating 128 records, published until 2022, this article reviews and critiques the literature on digitalization and coproduction/co-creation in public administration, offers an overview of the state of research, and outlines a future research agenda. The findings reveal four areas of concern that require more attention by researchers: the generation of public value; the analysis of the entire public service cycle; comparative studies; the mitigation of the risks arising from the implementation of digital technologies.

This study examines the impact of governance on the efficiency of nonprofit organizations and the relationship among different governance mechanisms. Using a dataset of 3496 Chinese foundations from 2011 to 2015, we find that internal governance, external donor governance, and external governance environment are significantly and positively associated with foundations’ efficiency. Importantly, substitutional relationships exist among these governance mechanisms. Financial reporting quality is a major channel through which governance influences efficiency. Furthermore, the positive association between governance and efficiency is more pronounced for small foundations than for large ones and for noneducation-focused foundations than for education-focused ones. This study offers practical guidance for foundations to improve their efficiency by enhancing both internal and external governance and will be of interest to foundation leaders, donors, and policymakers.