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1 – 10 of over 1000Ebba Sjögren and Karin Fernler
The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper problematizes previous research on accountingisation, where the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work is understood in relation to a professional/economic dichotomy and a model of episodic change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate everyday professional work in established new public management (NPM) settings, and proposes a new conceptual framework to analyze the role of accounting therein. The aim is to enable future investigations into how, when and where a situated “bottom line” emerges, by conceptualizing professional work as a process of calculation.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative data from case studies of two tertiary level geriatric organizations using observations of 33 employees and four interviews. Data related to patient discharge, and the management of the discharge processes, were analyzed.
Findings
Few visible trade-offs between distinctly professional or economic considerations were observed. Rather, the qualification of patients’ status and evaluation of their dischargeability centered on debates over treatment time. Time therefore operated as a situated “bottom line,” to which various other concerns were emergently linked in a process of calculation. Professional practitioners seldom explicitly evoke accounting concepts and technologies, but these were implicated in the ongoing translation of each patient into something temporarily stable, calculable and thus actionable for the professionals involved in their care. The study’s findings have implications for the conceptual understanding of professional work in established NPM settings.
Research limitations/implications
Case study research is context-specific and the role of accounting in professional work will vary due to the professional groups and accounting technologies involved.
Practical implications
The study’s findings have implications for how to influence professional behavior through interventions in the existing landscape of accounting technologies. The possibility to change behavior through the introduction or removal of individual accounting technologies is questioned.
Originality/value
To date, research on the role of accounting in determining the scope of professional work has assumed a professional/economic dichotomy and studied episodic change linked to accounting-oriented reforms. This paper analyses the role of accounting as an on-going process with emergent boundaries between professional and economic considerations.
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Riccardo Mussari, Pasquale Ruggiero and Daniela Sorrentino
Measurement and evaluation issues have long represented the main criticality of accrual accounting adoption in the public sector. While professional accountants and scholars have…
Abstract
Measurement and evaluation issues have long represented the main criticality of accrual accounting adoption in the public sector. While professional accountants and scholars have mostly focused on the recognition and measurement of typical public assets (e.g. heritage and community assets), the authors contend that more attention should be paid to the equity (net assets). The equity requires additional evaluation criteria that stem from the representation of an accounting aggregate that does not exist per se but rather derives as a residual from all the other items reported in the balance sheet. This chapter proposes an illustrative case study on the evolution of the accrual accounting principle for Italian local governments (LGs). The findings enable the gaining of a deeper understanding of how the equity can be represented and discuss which informative objectives it can address in public administrations. Practical recommendations are delivered for national and international accounting standard setters for the public sector.
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Ida Schrøder, Emilia Cederberg and Amalie M. Hauge
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper investigates how different and sometimes conflicting approaches to performance evaluations are hybridized in the day-to-day activities of a disciplined hybrid organization–i.e. a public child protection agency at the intersection between the market and the public sector.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a one-year ethnography of how employees achieve to qualify their work as “good work” in situations with several and sometimes conflicting ideals of what “good work” is. Fieldwork material was collected by following casework activities across organizational boundaries. By combining accounting literature on hybridization with literature on practices of valuation, the paper develops a novel theoretical framework which allows for analyses of the various practices of valuation, when and where they clash and how they persist over time in everyday work.
Findings
Throughout the study, four distinct registers of valuation were identified: feeling, theorizing, formalizing and costing. To denote the meticulous efforts of pursuing good work in all four registers of valuation, the authors propose the notion of sequencing. Sequencing is an ongoing process of moving conflicting registers away from each other and bringing them back together again. Correspondingly, at the operational level of a hybrid organization, temporary compartmentalization is a means of avoiding clashes, and in doing so, making it possible for different and sometimes conflicting ways of achieving good results to continuously hybridize and persist together.
Research limitations/implications
The single-case approach allows for analytical depth, but limits the findings to theoretical, rather than empirical, generalizability. The framework the authors propose, however, is well-suited for mobilization and potential elaboration in further empirical contexts.
Originality/value
The paper provides a novel theoretical framework as well as rich empirical material from the highly political field of child protection work, which has seldomly been studied within accounting research.
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Gillian Vesty, Olga Kokshagina, Miia Jansson, France Cheong and Kerryn Butler-Henderson
Despite major progress made in improving the health and well-being of millions of people, more efforts are needed for investment in 21st century health care. However, public…
Abstract
Purpose
Despite major progress made in improving the health and well-being of millions of people, more efforts are needed for investment in 21st century health care. However, public hospital waiting lists continue to grow. At the same time, there has been increased investment in e-health and digital interventions to enhance population health and reduce hospital admissions. The purpose of this study is to highlight the accounting challenges associated with measuring, investing and accounting for value in this setting. The authors argue that this requires more nuanced performance metrics that effect a shift from a technical practice to one that embraces social and moral values.
Design/methodology/approach
This research is based on field interviews held with clinicians, accountants and administrators in public hospitals throughout Australia and Europe. The field research and multidisciplinary narratives offer insights and issues relating to value and valuing and managing digital health investment decisions for the post-COVID-19 “value-based health-care” future of accounting in the hospital setting.
Findings
The authors find that the complex activity-based hospital funding models operate as a black box, with limited clinician understanding and hybridised accounting expertise for informed social, moral and ethical decision-making. While there is malleability of the health economics-derived activity-based hospital funding models, value contestation and conflict are evident in the operationalisation of these models in practice. Activity-based funding (ABF) mechanisms reward patient throughput volumes in hospitals but at the same time stymie investment in digital health. Although classified as strategic investments, there is a limit to strategic planning.
Research limitations/implications
Accounting in public hospitals has become increasingly visible and contested during the pandemic-driven health-care crisis. Further research is required to examine the hybridising accounting expertise as it is increasingly implicated in the incremental changes to ABF in the emergence of value-based health care and associated digital health investment strategies. Despite operationalising these health economic models in practice, accountants are currently being blamed for dysfunctional health-care decisions. Further education for practicing accountants is required to effect operational change. This includes education on the significant moral and ethical dilemmas that result from accounting for patient mix choices in public hospital service provision.
Originality/value
This research involved a multidisciplinary team from accounting, digital health, information systems, value-based health care and clinical expertise. Unique insights on the move to digital health care are provided. This study contributes to policy development and the limited value-based health-care literature in accounting.
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Cemil Eren Fırtın and Tom S. Karlsson
This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care…
Abstract
Purpose
This article addresses issues of calculation and economization in contemporary public organizations. In particular, it investigates how choices of organizing emergency health-care have been affected by accounting as a performative device. Special attention has been paid to how accounting brings about performative consequences in shaping the medical profession and its context.
Design/methodology/approach
The article employs qualitative research methods and draws its analysis on empirical data from in-depth interviews at an emergency health-care unit in Sweden.
Findings
It is demonstrated how accounting, in the form of calculations of treatment time and number of patients, enables performative consequences for medical professional work. It is also demonstrated how the use of accounting engages (re)descriptions of practices and roles, creates accounts of patients, and helps to sustain such (re)descriptions. Accounting terms (such as efficiency and control) have been reframed into medical terminology (such as health-care quality and security), ensuring and retaining (re)described medical professional work in terms of practices and emerging roles.
Originality/value
This article contributes to (1) the literature on accounting practices within health-care contexts by demonstrating a case where the accounting ideas and practices of medical professionals are coexistent and interwoven and (2) the increasing body of literature focusing on accountingization by showing how emerging calculative technologies carry performative power over medical professional work through formative (re)descriptions.
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Nikos Kartalis, Mathew Tsamenyi and Kelum Jayasinghe
The purpose of this paper is to examine how accounting is implicated in the creation and maintenance of organizational boundaries. The analysis focuses on organizations subjected…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how accounting is implicated in the creation and maintenance of organizational boundaries. The analysis focuses on organizations subjected to conflicting objectives as a result of new public management (NPM) reforms.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis is based on case studies of four cultural organizations (Show Caves) in Greece. Data are collected from semi-structured interviews, informal discussions and document analysis. The paper draws on Bourdieu’s concepts of “field”, “capital” and “habitus” and Llewellyn’s analysis of organizational boundary maintenance.
Findings
The study observes that NPM reforms contributed to shifting organizational boundaries – from cultural/archaeological to economic/financial and this resulted in conflicting organizational objectives. This subsequently created conflicts between key actors (municipal politicians, professional managers and anthropologists). These actors, depending on the positions (and habitus) they occupy, and the capital (political, cultural and symbolic) they hold, are able to bargain for resources (economic capital). The conflicting objectives (archaeological/cultural/historical, political and commercial) that emerged and the tensions that arose between the key players shaped the identities and boundaries of the Show Caves.
Originality/value
The study makes an original contribution by revealing the complexity and struggle between actors and the role of accounting in managing the boundaries. For example, the study explains how financial threshold and accountability structures function within these cultural organizations that are subjected to conflicting objectives in the context of NPM reforms.
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This paper aims to consider the suitability of Anglo‐American new public management (NPM) practices in the context of public sector reform in Japan.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to consider the suitability of Anglo‐American new public management (NPM) practices in the context of public sector reform in Japan.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines the two principal alternative approaches that have been taken to public sector reform in the UK and the USA. These comprise in the case of the UK the setting of targets by politicians and the monitoring by quasi‐autonomous non‐governmental organisations of the extent to which these are delivered upon. This is in contrast to the USA, where reform has been founded upon “market‐oriented populism”. Reforms implemented by successive Japanese administrations since the end of the Second World War are considered and the extent to which these manifested a philosophical preference for either approach.
Findings
The research finds that the Anglo‐American (occidental) versions of NPM may not be appropriate in the context of public sector reform in Japan. Attempts to achieve a decentralised and deregulated form of NPM, philosophically rooted in the 1945 Constitution as written by the post‐Second World War Occupying Power, the United States, and mimicked from its Anglo‐American contexts by Japan's political elite may, paradoxically, delay achievement of more culturally accommodating reform of the bureaucracy acceptable to all the country's principal democratic stakeholders.
Practical implications
The need for Japan's public sector reformers to evolve a unique form of NPM which accommodates the cultural and historical traditions of the country instead of mimicking occidental approaches is identified. Specifically, the paper provides policy proposals as to how this alternative to the UK and US models may be developed.
Originality/value
The paper suggests an alternative approach to public sector reform in Japan, which may be suitable for other countries looking to implement NPM but finding the USA and UK policies unsuitable in the context of their own traditions. Accordingly, the paper should be of value to public sector managers and policy makers generally who are looking to innovate upon traditional models of NPM.
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Andrew Goddard and Tausi Ally Mkasiwa
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the budgeting practices in the Tanzanian Central Government. New budgeting reforms were introduced following exhortations from the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the budgeting practices in the Tanzanian Central Government. New budgeting reforms were introduced following exhortations from the bodies such as the UN, the World Bank and the IMF and reflect the new public management (NPM).
Design/methodology/approach
A grounded theory methodology was used. This methodology is inductive, allowing phenomena to emerge from the participants rather than from prior theory. This ensures both relevance and depth of understanding.
Findings
The principal research findings from the data concern the central phenomenon of “struggling for conformance”. Tanzanian Central Government adopted innovations in order to ensure donor funding by demonstrating its ability to implement imposed budgetary changes. Organizational actors were committed to these reforms through necessity and struggled to implement them, rather than more overtly resisting them.
Research limitations/implications
The research is subject to the usual limitations of case study, inductive research.
Practical implications
This research has several implications for policy-makers of NPM and budgetary reforms. These include the recognition that the establishment of the rules and regulations alone is not adequate for the successful implementation of budgetary and NPM reforms and should involve a comprehensive view of the nature of the internal and external environment.
Originality/value
There are few empirical papers of NPM accounting practices being implemented in the public sector of developing countries and none at all based in Tanzania. The paper identifies the existence of struggling to conform to reforms rather than resistance identified in prior research.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of new public management (NPM) as a major strategy for democratic police reform in transitioning, developing and post‐conflict…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of new public management (NPM) as a major strategy for democratic police reform in transitioning, developing and post‐conflict nations.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper reviews the literature and history of the use of NPM in the public sector and policing in Western nations and considers its use in programs of police reform.
Findings
The review identifies that NPM can be used as a strategy in police reform and is able to be used in conjunction with policing approaches such as community‐oriented policing. However, the adoption of NPM must be culturally specific and implemented within local capability constraints.
Practical implications
Police reform, transparency and accountability are an important concern for all post‐conflict and transitioning police agencies; therefore, the findings of this research are useful for implementation or planning of police reform and restructuring programs.
Originality/value
With its focus on police management accountability in post‐conflict or transitioning nations, this article expands research on strategies of democratic police reform and capacity development.
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Michela Arnaboldi, Irvine Lapsley and Martina Dal Molin
This paper aims to examine the trajectory of public management reforms in Italy. This experience indicates the complexity of managerialism in countries with a legalistic system…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the trajectory of public management reforms in Italy. This experience indicates the complexity of managerialism in countries with a legalistic system and where public administration cultures have been, and continue to be, embedded in politics.
Design/methodology/approach
The analysis of managerial reforms in Italy was carried out with a documentary analysis. In addition to official reports and acts of parliament, the analysis was based on monitoring the government websites and innovative channels (e.g. Facebook) which communicated the progress of the later reforms.
Findings
The paper shows how modernization of public services has been a continuous priority in the agenda of the Italian Government across four phases: an early attempt in the late 1970s; a lively, phase for Italian managerial reforms in the 1990s; a later advocacy in the 2000s of a specific new public management (NPM) element – performance management; an after-crises reform aimed at reducing public expenditure.
Originality/value
The paper takes a historical and long-term perspective to analyse the success and failure of NPM reforms implementation in Italy. Differently from previous studies, this papers analyses NPM reforms in a longitudinal perspective, to show how the legalistic culture of Italy continues to affect the implementation of NPM reforms.
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