Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

Social enterprises (SEs) are claimed to be able to address “wicked social problems¹” in various policy instruments and governance models. However, doubts have been raised about whether the hybrid nature results in fundamental challenges that could prevent SEs from becoming ideal and sustainable public service organizations. Drawing upon organizational resilience literature, this article reveals two trade-offs between social and business service qualities when SEs seek long-term solutions to the challenges in delivering public services. This article argues that SEs—employing different hybrid models, emphasizing social or business service quality—jointly can overcome the trade-offs to deliver sustainable and accountable public services at the public service contract level and the individual user's level.

During the era of New Public Management from the 1970s to the 1990s, government accountability in Australia underwent a significant transformation from compliance to performance evaluation. This change underscores a Machiavellian interpretation presented in this paper, emphasizing the politicized and power-driven nature of public sector accounting reforms. The Australian Government employed a commercial accounting model to legitimize these reforms, leveraging Machiavellian principles to strengthen political power. Despite the accounting profession's role in legitimizing public sector financial reporting, its control over Australian accounting standard setting diminished. The new public sector accountability framework allowed the shifting of blame to the profession when problems arose. An analysis of the New South Wales Government's journey through the reform, from embracing accrual accounting to rejecting heritage assets measurement and applauding fair value, illustrates the complex interplay between self-interest and the protection of public interest. The Australian Government strategically enlisted the support of the outer fringe accounting profession and successfully instituted reforms premised on the principle of public accountability and liberty for Australian society. Once the reformer's goals were achieved, the facilitating elites found themselves marginalized from the bureaucratic group and power reclaimed deftly to the Government with CLERP reforms paving the way for the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards. This shift exemplifies Machiavelli's perspective, where liberty is used as a means to garner public support and ultimately attain power, a strategy that continues to hold validity in contemporary political contexts.

Understanding how charities have survived, and sometimes thrived, in the face of crisis has given rise to an increased interest in the resilience of these organizations. Research on dealing with uncertainty and crisis situations notes the ability to adapt as a critical resilience component (Siders, 2019). However, resilience and adaptive capacity in the charity sector are under-researched areas. This paper contributes to filling this gap by investigating two midsized Scottish charitable organizations that have weathered two significant crises: austerity as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic. The study findings enhance resilience research by shedding light on the processes, actions and collaborations that facilitate resilience, and the importance of adaptive capacity in response to crisis. Two distinct approaches to resilience were identified: (1) a strategic approach to resilience, where the charity thrived in the face of crisis and demonstrated high levels of adaptive capacity, and (2) a pragmatic approach, where resilience equated to survival, adaptive capacity was low and, as a result, growth was limited.

Using Giddens (1984) structuration theory (ST), in this paper we illustrate how the efficiency-driven approaches adopted by a large stated-owned public company in Latin America (Latin American Multiutility Conglomerate [LAMC]) implicitly resulted in triggering a dam disaster with far-reaching socio-economic, environmental, and human consequences. Data for the study were derived through document analysis and conducting unstructured, semi-structured, and email interviews. Our findings show that the internalization of efficiency as a corporate value at LAMC was further rationalized through the adoption of new public management (NPM)-based management accounting practices (MAPs) embedded within the market-led development approach. These MAPs connected agencies and structures in a dialectic way and continued reproducing efficiency through day-to-day operations and by enabling the company to champion itself as a successful NPM adopter. However, throughout this process, the socio-environmental and human costs relating to “the dam project” were overlooked, making the disaster inevitable. The paper questions the market-led development approach, and NPM-based MAPs, and calls for further empirical work delineating how MAPs can be implicated in public value creation and promoting publicness in emerging economies. Such work is of paramount importance not only to prevent the “unexpected and unwanted effects of public sector accounting” under NPM and market-led development but also to save the lives and livelihoods of poor and vulnerable community members in emerging economies.

By utilizing the concepts of field, habitus, and capital inherited from Bourdieu, this study explores publicness as a social practice. In doing this, the paper problematizes publicness concerning accountability and public value and empirically explores the organization of social support delivery in Istanbul. We posit our research question: In what manners does publicness open up a space for collaboration and convergence in relation to accountability? The data gathering and analysis follow a qualitative methodology. We found different forms of publicness under three different conditionalities: (1) publicness as political authority based on hierarchization and centralization; (2) publicness as competing positions produced by diverse actors and their diverse positions taken beyond hierarchical relations; (3) publicness as social inclusion and diversity that is all-embracing by employing more inclusive practices. Publicness relationally unfolds public value with and among formal rules, voluntary practices, and networks. By delving into constitutive elements of practice—symbolic capital and habitus—engaging in the field struggles of redefining and owning publicness, the paper goes beyond the conventional dichotomy of normative versus empirical conceptualizations of publicness and instead differentiates among distinct forms of publicness in different conditionalities and contributes to the literature by bridging publicness and accountability habitus.

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.