Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. Although belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that although the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice, this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.

This article provides a systematic review of the literature on backsourcing. The aim is to synthesize existing literature in order to compare and analyze similarities and differences in backsourcing in the private and public sectors. The study asks questions about: which methods and theories have been used, why backsourcing has been implemented, and what reasons have been described for backsourcing. The study is based on an analysis of 500 articles about backsourcing and 33 articles in the final data set. The results show that backsourcing is primarily caused by: increased costs, lack of quality, and contract problems in the private sector, along with loss of control, cost saving, and changed strategy in the public sector. The study's synthesis highlights three explanations for how backsourcing is managed and interpreted in both the sectors. The article contributes specifically to summarizing current research on backsourcing, synthesizing how backsourcing has been studied, illustrating gaps in the research, as well as explaining relevant differences between private and public backsourcing.

Canada entered the COVID-19 pandemic with a strong fiscal position, which gave it room to mitigate its economic impacts. Of interest in this paper is the history of Canada's financial position in terms of net debt as reported in the Government of Canada's annual financial statements. Net debt is a measure of fiscal sustainability that has been reported in the Government of Canada's public accounts since the country's earliest days. It created (and continues to create) a particular visibility of the “effectiveness” of the federal government's financial management and of the country's financial position at a particular point in time but also impacts future political policy. Although there were periods of sharp increases in the federal net debt over the country's history, the federal government was always able to regain control, and this has resulted in the reasonable level of net debt the country has today. This study shows how this net debt changed, was sustained over time, and was influenced by the political and economic context in which it was situated. We find evidence of its use for supporting government accountability to the population but also as an accounting measure employed by the government to influence public opinion and thereby gain support for government policy.

Traditionally, public-sector auditors are concerned with auditing the legality and regularity of government activities (compliance audits). However, such auditors are increasingly expected to conduct “performance audits” and communicate economic errors due to inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and poor economic decisions to the auditee. This type of role change is often accompanied by role stress. This study explores whether role stress—role conflict and role ambiguity—among local public-sector auditors and their perception of their new business partner role are precursors of their communication of detected economic errors to their auditees. Therefore, survey data from German local public sector auditors (i.e., municipalities and counties) are gathered and analyzed. Our results show that compare to those in other organizations, auditors who work in more formalized public-sector audit organizations are less likely to experience role ambiguity and role conflict and to communicate auditees’ economic errors more actively. Furthermore, we find that auditors who do not experience role ambiguity find it easier to see themselves as a business partner of the auditee and show more active economic error communication. The present study informs the literature on performance auditing by transferring the business partner concept to the context of public-sector auditing and applying a role theory perspective to reveal drivers of economic error communication.

The aim of this paper is to examine how verbal rewards (praise) from superior public managers influence subordinate public managers’ work motivation coming from experiencing work tasks as important, exciting, interesting, and fun, so-called autonomous motivation. We use self-determination theory (SDT) to theorize that depending on how they are provided, verbal rewards can enhance or undermine autonomous motivation. This is because different verbal reward practices have different effects on subordinate public managers’ basic psychological needs, which in turn influences their autonomous motivation. Based on a cross-sectional survey completed by 331 public managers in four Swedish local government organizations, we find that verbal rewards that are performance-contingent and provided frequently undermine public managers’ autonomous motivation. Verbal rewards enhance autonomous motivation when they are based on skills and results. Our study contributes to the public management literature discussing the applicability of rewards in public sector organizations where autonomous motivation is crucial for performance. It contributes to practice by suggesting that superior managers who provide skills/result-based verbal rewards are more likely to enhance than undermine the autonomous motivation of subordinates. In support of SDT, the overall conclusion is that the impact of verbal rewards on public managers’ autonomous motivation is contingent on how verbal rewards are provided by superiors. However, our results should be interpreted with some caution due to the circumstance that cross-sectional survey research can only ensure associations between constructs and not causality.

This article traverses the range of issues evoked by research relating public accountability and democracy. It conceptualizes these issues as being a mosaic that is ever-changing and has been growing significantly in size since the 1970s. That mosaic presents itself in this Special Issue as being accountability appearances on a stage that is viewed within a theatre of democracy. The articles published in this Special Issue are also introduced.

In this paper, we examine how Covid-19 was utilized by the management of a university as a catalyst for ideological change, with the objective of transforming the ethos of a university management school and the role(s) of the academics employed within. Through new modes of working that maintained corporeal distance between university staff, market-based ideology was mobilized to institute radical and lasting change within the roles of academics and operations of the institution. We focus on a singular case study: “Blue Management School” (BMS, pseudonym), based within an English mid-tier research university which has historically embraced corporatization more readily than most of its peers. We conducted a qualitative analysis of management email communications and from interviews with nine academics (both current and former employees) who were working at BMS during the time concerned (March 2020 onward). We observe that Covid-19 posed significant challenges to corporatized universities, and that university managers at BMS sought to address these challenges by undertaking further steps toward corporatization and mobilizing organizational change legitimized by the need to manage the Covid-19 situation. This included hierarchical forms of accountability, with academics answering for module content to teaching convenors and the management team (“manager academics”). We draw attention to how management communications carried profound effects for the mobilization of ideological change within the institution, during this period. In addition, academic identity was affected, moving away from traditional research and teaching scholars toward revenue-generating customer service workers, facilitating a power shift away from academics and further toward managers.

Hospitals in Norway are organized as trusts, required to follow the same accounting principles as the private sector, and responsible for funding their own investments. Thus, being able to run with a surplus has been an important part of their management. We analyze hospital budgeting for the whole sector over a 9-year period, looking at the size of the budget surplus, degree of optimism bias, and degree of budget accuracy when comparing to the actual financial results. Our findings indicate that on average, health trusts budget with a relatively small surplus. We find indications for optimism bias, but also examples of pessimism bias. Large health trusts seem to have a higher degree of accuracy of the budgeted results. Trusts that fail to meet budgeted results have a lower budgeted surplus the following period. Capital intensity, an indication of need for new investments, is not associated with budget surplus, degree of optimism, or budget accuracy.

This article argues that since 1979, in the UK, democratic accountability has been eroded—in spite of the far greater emphasis formally placed upon meeting the ideal of transparent workings of power. First, we look at structural reforms made to the government by Margaret Thatcher and how these led to an attenuation of ministerial accountability. Second, we consider how the increasing role of accountants and management consultants in formulating and delivering government policy subverts the ideal of a disinterested bureaucracy and results in a blurring of private (for-profit) and public interests.