Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

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.

This paper develops a performativist metaphysical grounding of NPM-based performance measurement as a radical alternative to a representationalist grounding, an alternative that turns performance measurement on its head. Performance measurement turns from an act of representation characterized by a metaphor of reflection into an ethical practice of mattering characterized by a metaphor of diffraction. In performativism, performance measurement does not (imperfectly) represent performance as a base for knowing and intervention from afar (both in terms of space and time) but is somehow performative of who and what come to count in the world. Its exclusionary character makes it an inherently ethical practice. We contrast a performativist grounding of performance measurement with a representationalist grounding and rework concepts of responsibility and accountability. We illustrate a performativist grounding of performance measurement with examples from academia and healthcare and provide a direction for future research.

This paper investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.K. third-sector (nonprofit organizations and social enterprises) and socially oriented small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and provides insights regarding their organizational resilience. Using data from the Longitudinal Small Business Survey, the results of an extensive empirical analysis suggest that relative to commercial (for-profit) SMEs, social enterprises were less likely, and socially oriented SMEs more likely to perceive the pandemic as an obstacle to business success. Third-sector and socially oriented SMEs were more likely to increase their activities compared to commercial SMEs. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have had a differential impact on the future plans of third-sector and socially oriented SMEs relative to commercial SMEs. Third-sector organizations were less likely to use government-backed loans, suggesting a need for alternative forms of support or financing to weather economic disruptions. Overall, our analysis suggests a resiliency and versatility among third-sector and socially oriented SMEs in dealing with unexpected and significant external shocks.

Performance management in the public sector is both multifaceted and convoluted. This is particularly pertinent in hospitals, which are complex institutional organizations. Our paper explores the key drivers compelling Irish public acute-care hospitals to monitor their performance. The context of our study is located against the unique historical backdrop of the Irish health service, whose evolution over time reflects religious control, underfunding by the State and reliance on a decentralized structure up until the early 2000s. This study was conducted during 2009–2010, in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–2009. Interviews were conducted with members of the hospital executive management team, comprising clinical and nonclinical senior managers, using the framework of Kelly et al. (2015) to explore and analyze respondent perspectives. We propose that a combination of key forces, emanating from new public management, the institutional environment, and its constituent elements spurs hospitals to monitor their performance. The confluence of these forces reveals a perceived change in the institutional logic underpinning hospital performance management. This change involved the substitution of autonomous clinical decision-making for a more team-based managerial logic whereby clinicians engaged as part of a multidisciplinary executive unit and accepted responsibility for hospital performance. This paper contributes to the literature on performance management in public services and, more specifically, builds on and addresses the paucity of research on Irish acute-care hospitals.

This paper explores the way by which universities create meaning of digitized performance measures on research quality and their effects on university scholars’ actions. Drawing on pragmatic constructivism, we scrutinize the epistemic methods by which the digitized performance measures of research quality are handled and used in the governance of research activities in two disciplinary fields in two university settings (Denmark and Italy) and their implications for constructing scholarly research practices. The analysis elucidates exemplars of two epistemic methods of building meaning of and using digitized performance measures: one reflective and interactive, and one authoritative and mechanical. The latter constrains the researchers’ scholarly reasoning and communication and, hence, infringes upon the scholarly fundamentals of university practices. The paper concludes that if the issues of misconceptions of research quality related to the transitions from analog to digital language are neglected, the digital transformation results in dysfunctional human and social practices.

In this paper, we present an analysis of how activity-based costing (ABC) was included among austerity policy prescriptions within the healthcare sector. Relying on the proposition that an increasing quality of outcomes is achievable simultaneously with a reduction in costs, ABC straddled tensions between the logics of care and business for clinicians but not for administrators. We draw on case study research and use institutional logics and related approaches to analyze how the introduction of ABC became a device that improved communication by clinicians with administrators. When actors’ interests and motivations were aligned, ABC was able to offer professional clinicians value in the hospital in question. The study demonstrates how and why competing logics can coexist where there is ability to affect decision-making.