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This paper aims to explore the financial and non-financial accountability disclosure patterns of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as hybrid organizations.

Adopting the hybridity concept and resorting to stakeholder theory, this paper works on a comparison between the accountability disclosure patterns of hybrid and private organizations operating in the same industry. European national news agencies are selected as units of analysis and an extensive web content analysis is performed on three categories of information.

SOEs are found to disclose a broader spectrum of information than private organizations, and differences between them have been found. Nevertheless, both financial and non-financial disclosures are underdeveloped in the two organizational types.

This paper illustrates how hybridity explains SOEs’ accountability disclosure patterns. Results could not be complemented through information on disclosure through alternative channels. Future studies are encouraged to perform simultaneous comparisons among hybrid, public and private organizations, as well as considering industry specifics.

As web accountability disclosure helps to address the demands of distant stakeholders, efforts are needed to enhance SOEs’ web accountability disclosures and not to undermine democratic accountability relationships.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the accountability mechanisms and style of SOEs. Using a framework for hybrid organizations provides an understanding of how SOEs, as hybrid organizations, disclose information for accountability. In turn, this allows, and then promotes, the investigation of social phenomena by conceiving hybridity as a standalone institutional space.

International education is one of the largest and fastest growing economic sectors in the world. Degree-seeking students have become a large and growing export opportunity. Asian countries, especially China, are amongst the top countries sending students out, as a result, most countries aim to attract their students. Nevertheless, moving from Asian countries to the western ones is not an easy move. Chinese students face different types of challenges that need to be analysed to smooth their adaptation. This chapter analyses their performance, satisfaction and the challenges – pedagogical, language, cultural – they face to deploy the appropriate strategies to reduce failure and drop-out. Results show that the first 2 years are key for they adaptation. Language is the main barrier, it seems that the time devoted prior to their universities studies and their integration with national students is still a pending task.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how to raise organizational performance in public sector organizations through human resource management. Specifically, this paper aims to investigate the link between structural empowerment and organizational performance, and the mediating role of the psychological empowerment of employees.

The authors apply multilevel structural equation modeling using a sample of 103 local governments’ managers and 461 employees from Spain.

The results show that structural empowerment is positively associated with organizational performance. Surprisingly, this relationship is not mediated by psychological empowerment, although it is a powerful antecedent of organizational performance.

In the context of new public management, structural empowerment emerges as a useful component of human resource management for improving organizational performance in public sector organizations. Nevertheless, scant research has combined structural empowerment practices and employees’ feelings of empowerment, which would create a global view to shed light on their role to increase organizational performance. Therefore, this paper examines the mediating function of psychological empowerment (individual level) in the structural empowerment–organizational performance link (organizational level) in the context of public sector organizations.

Supreme audit institutions (SAIs) examine and supervise the activity of public institutions. The study aims at contributing to the existing literature on public sector audit by providing a classification of 29 European SAIs – 28 national SAIs and the European Court of Auditors (ECA) – based on a broad range of attributes varying from the SAIs' environment to its structure, activity, resources or transparency.

The authors apply quantitative methodology for clustering by means of multidimensional scaling and regressive ordinary least square (OLS) and logistic models.

The authors' results show that SAIs from veteran EU member states (MSs) are more similar amongst them and the same applies to SAIs from Nordic countries, Baltic countries, Western Mediterranean countries and Eastern countries. The authors also perform additional analysis focussing on currently relevant issues such as gender equality, age, environment or the sustainable development goals (SDGs), concluding that the younger the institutions' staff, the more transparent the institutions are. The authors also find that more transparent SAIs report on environmental audits, more prone to cover the SDGs in their audits.

The research is limited in purpose and scope because data cover only Europe. Given the limited number of observations (29), it does not have prospective purposes but only explanatory ones. The authors' findings are interesting for researchers because they offer original insights on public audit in Europe and cover matters of current interest such as environment, transparency or gender equality.

The research is also of interest for public auditors because it offers them information that may help them improve their activity and find institutional synergies, as the dataset is available to public auditors.

From a social view point, the paper shows that public auditors perform work on topics of interest for the citizens.

The dataset compiled for the research offers extensive data and a wide variety of attributes defining European SAIs and may offer future opportunities for research from different perspectives.

Literature about transparency in public-sector organizations has been attracting the attention of scholars for the last two decades. This study reviews the existing literature with the intention of creating a description of the state of the art, categorized by geographical areas, levels of government, topics, and methodologies.

The authors have developed a structured literature review following a rigorous protocol. The initial search was launched on 25 April 2022 on Scopus and Web of Science, resulting in 3,217 articles. After removing duplicates and studies that did not meet all the inclusion criteria specified in the review protocol, the final sample includes 956 articles from 1991 to 2021.

The analyses show a considerable increase in studies since 2005, especially in the last two years, when 30% of the publications have been produced. Most of the studies analyze the national/central level of government. Many authors compare different countries, while other scholars focus on specific countries, overall, the USA and the UK. The local level of government has also been widely studied, especially in the Spanish and Chinese contexts. The most frequently used methodologies are quantitative and empirical techniques, and the most common topics are those associated with accountability.

This study uses a huge sample (956 articles over the period 1991–2021), which has never been used before, to examine the literature on transparency. The structured literature review facilitates the identification of gaps that can be filled by future studies. These include analyzing transparency in specific geographical areas like Africa, Asia, and Latin America, studying transparency at different levels of government, especially at the regional and federal levels, and providing comparative studies and case study collections.

This paper seeks to extend the analysis of performance management regimes by Bouckaert and Halligan to other countries in order to contribute to the developing theory of forms and challenges in public sector performance management.

The state of performance management and the context in which it has evolved is assessed in seven different countries using dimensions drawn from Bouckaert and Halligan's work along with elements from earlier work by Pollitt and Bouckaert. These are summarized in a table and comparisons made to generate additional insights into the factors that influence the shape and speed of public management evolution.

The paper finds that the Bouckaert and Halligan framework for analyzing public sector performance management is useful, albeit with some modifications. Specifically, it finds that administrative culture is a key factor influencing the speed of reform and that the attitude of elites (politicians and civil servants, in most cases) is also a vital piece of the puzzle that was not included in Bouckaert and Halligan, but did appear in the earlier framework of Pollitt and Bouckaert. It also finds evidence that economic and political crises occurring together accelerate the introduction of integrated performance management systems, but that trust in government does not appear to be a significant factor. Finally, the paper observes that, absent political crisis/commitment, governments will prioritise “external” performance measures such as customer service, participation and transparency objectives over “internal” performance measures such as financial, staff management and whole of government reporting.

The countries studied provide a rare insight into lesser‐known performance management regimes and the use of the Bouckaert and Halligan framework allows for comparisons to earlier (and future) research. The findings will be of interest to scholars in public administration reform and performance management.