Financial Accountability & Management最新文献

The COVID-19 pandemic put governments under pressure to make radical and urgent decisions, and to implement new digital solutions to steer society and deliver public services. Our study analyzes social media discourse to understand the co-production of a digital public service in an emergency situation. Empirically, we mobilize Twitter netnography and discourse analysis to examine citizens’ perceptions of the contact tracing app (CTA) introduced by the UK government to tackle the pandemic and save lives. Our study contributes to research on public sector accountability for digital transformations by advancing scholarly understanding of how societal concerns and public perceptions impact the co-production of digital services. Our findings reveal a high level of public skepticism toward the app and a general distrust of the UK government among the main social challenges of the CTA's implementation. Furthermore, we evidence widespread public distress over the potential violation of democratic freedoms and misuse of the data collected by the app. Finally, we reflect on the linkages between the lack of governmental accountability and the difficulties in mitigating the expressed societal concerns, causing a corresponding resistance on the part of the public to engage in and support co-production.

This study aims to contribute to the understanding of stakeholder participation within the International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board's (IPSASB) due process. This study examines IPSASB's input legitimacy by analysing who the respondents are in exposure draft (ED) 63, Social Benefits, and to what extent they support the ED; however, the emphasis lies on the quality of the IPSASB's due process through the legitimacy theory, more precisely procedural legitimacy, by investigating to what extent the respondents’ input was considered and integrated into the final International Public Sector Accounting Standards. Most respondents originate from Europe and Oceania and consist of professional associations and public sector entities. There are indications that some respondents’ input was integrated; however, results indicate a clear flaw in the lack of transparency regarding how respondents’ input is analysed, which makes the decision-making process seem arbitrary and subjective and could potentially have a negative effect on the IPSASB's legitimacy.

This paper studies how clinical leaders perceive their leadership tasks in the context of virtual interactions. We ask whether distant leadership involves a shift from relationship orientation to more task- and control-oriented leaders in hospital settings. We explore two cases involving 10 clinical leaders in a university hospital in Norway. The study indicates that the leaders were aware that lack of direct communication hampers relationship-oriented leadership, which weakens efforts to develop a common identity in the clinics. The absence of direct communication reduces opportunities for relationship-oriented leadership, which may hamper the development of social and self-controls in professional organizations. However, clinical leaders are dependent on professionals’ social and self-controls to perform at high levels. Large distances reduce leaders’ ability to build personal relations with their staff. On the other hand, professionals in healthcare are highly educated, and thus they are to a large degree self-governed. The possible effects of distant leadership may consequently not be that harmful in clinical settings.

This paper investigates the influence of digitalization on different modes of peer selection in public sector benchmarking. We do so in the context of a field study of the impact of “Kolada”—a digital database and benchmarking device comparing the performance of Swedish municipalities. We find that the municipal quality controllers often used algorithmically selected peer groups to identify “pure” performance gaps for a range of performance indicators. Politicians, departmental managers, and the citizenry, however, continued to prefer benchmarking against neighboring municipalities. Drawing on Gieryn's concept of cultural cartography, differences in peer selection are characterized as a form of credibility contest between digitally generated and local maps. Our paper contributes to the literature in three main ways. First, we demonstrate how peer selection involves a mutual interplay between new digitally generated, abstract maps of performance and local cartographic legacies sustained by complex social attachments. Second, our paper illustrates the importance of often overlooked social ties informing processes of peer selection, highlighting the importance of professional ties, neighborly familiarity, and affective relations. Third, our paper characterizes the power of “native truths.” More generally, our paper indicates the epistemic authority of digital “truths” is contestable and may be resisted. Ultimately, the coexistence of “old” and new epistemic maps confers choice, which contributes to the legitimacy of new technologies enabling digitalized benchmarking to persist in shifting and locally meaningful ways.

This paper sets out to explore how hybrid organizations managed their established institutional complexity in the past, and what place was there for accounting in this endeavor. The paper draws on a historical case study of how a social entity operated in 14th–16th-century Venice. Ca’ di Dio, a hospice providing hospitality and care to poor women, is what today we would call a “hybrid organization,” in that it was born at the crossroads of ecclesiastic and public jurisdictions, it was autonomously administered, self-financed through commercial activities, but operated within the public control of the State. It will be found that Ca’ di Dio worked within a complex arrangement of multiple logics, that these logics coexisted without particular tension or conflict, and that accounting was a central practice to manage Ca’ di Dio activities, despite its noncommercial nature. The paper thus, while contributing to documenting the presence of hybrid organizations in the past, also questions the presupposed tension and conflict in logics that these organizations are thought to come with. Finally, it also documents the trivial, but overlooked, role of accounting as primarily a calculative tool for everyday management in hybrid organizations.

This study discusses the current state of the art and future directions of research on digitalization, accountability, and accounting in public services. Through a systematic literature review, we investigate 232 articles published between 1998 and the first quarter of 2020. These studies are analyzed looking at the implications of the increasing digitalization of the public realm for the (i) production of data, (ii) consumption of data, and (iii) their subsequent effects. Based upon this analysis, we identify the following emerging critical digital accountability issues and related future research avenues: the potential for dialogic and horizontal, multicentric accountability; the blurring of accountability roles and boundaries; the increasing relevance of translation processes and translators’ roles—and the need to ensure accountability in such translations; the need to pay stronger attention to social equity and inclusivity implications of digitalization.

Both England and the Netherlands have seen efforts to liberalise their audit markets for local government in recent decades. According to economic theory, these should benefit buyers as increased competition produces lower prices and improved quality. Increasing the number of competing audit firms in markets traditionally dominated by few large firms is widely seen as a key ingredient to this process. However, liberalisation has taken different paths in England, compared to the Netherlands. In England, a national-level collaborative purchasing arrangement has seen a small number of large firms competing, whilst in the Netherlands, a free market has led to the withdrawal by Big-4 firms and rapidly growing market share by mid-tier and small firms. In this paper, we analyse contrasting market developments in local public audit in England and the Netherlands and accordingly analyse the underlying factors through applying an established framework for market analysis from industrial economics, Porter's five forces framework, together with an institutional logics approach to further understand the factors involved. We find the Porter framework a useful tool to identify structural differences between markets but one that requires further analysis to explain underlying dynamics, which in the case of Dutch and English local public audit markets is effectively provided by the use of concepts from institutional logics including a historical contingency analysis.

Based on a case study of a large Swedish local government municipality, we explored the extent to which a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (CERP) system enabled the role performance of public sector management accountants. Our findings suggest that the CERP system enabled central management accountants to mobilize their specific expertise because it eliminated manual work, increased transparency, and made them feel more comfortable with the numbers. However, the less flexible features of a CERP system provided by external vendors, such as limited customization, posed a challenge for the local management accountants serving the different needs of a diverse range of managers and business units. Looking at the different attitudes that central and local management accountants developed toward the CERP system, we found that although both focal groups in our analysis belonged to the same occupation, they framed the role of technology differently. Although local management accountants framed it as a tool that should enable them to draw on their local expertise to produce tailor-made information for their local units, central management accountants saw the CERP system as a tool that allowed them to consume prefabricated “high-quality” information to assure efficient and risk-free accounting processes throughout the entire organization. Given this, cloud technology constitutes a risk that accounting and control processes become unduly inflexible and cumbersome at the local level. Coping with an inflexible cloud-based system may therefore add to the list of challenges that public sector management accountants experience when trying to be(come) business partners.

In the future, environmental disasters and resource constraints will continue to impact the public sector audit environment. Governments will be held responsible for their responses and the corresponding financial impacts, particularly rising levels of public debt. Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) are vital in keeping governments accountable. Yet, they also need legitimacy and they are subject to isomorphic pressures to gain this. Mimetic isomorphism explains SAIs’ structures, although they remain diverse, worldwide. Our analysis of extensive data about SAIs together with statistical measures about countries, an international survey and document analysis enables us to make projections about what isomorphic pressures will shape SAIs and enable them to deal with an uncertain future. Examining public debt and the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals as case studies, we show how isomorphism will shape SAIs’ responses to an uncertain future.