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The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the potential for service integration by focusing at the level of the individual rather than through structural integration or care coordination. The paper illustrates the potential for integration through the experience of the personal health budgets pilot programme.

This paper is based on a review of the experience of personal health budget pilot sites, drawing on the national evaluation of the pilot programme and the author's experience of working with pilot sites between 2010 and 2013. It also draws on the experience of similar programmes in the USA.

Personal health budgets support integration in two distinct ways. First, they can support the delivery of more holistic, whole‐person care in line with the principles of shared decision making. Second, by bringing personal budgets in social care and personal health budgets together, they can provide a vehicle for integration across health and social care systems. If integration starts from, and responds to, what matters most to individuals rather than with the development of joint structures and processes, the result is more likely to be integrated care.

This is one of only a small number of papers that discusses the scope for personal health budgets to improve the integration of care. Integration between the NHS and social care, in particular, has been identified as a central priority for the NHS.

The purpose of this study is to investigate differences between individual and collective budgeting decisions with respect to budgetary slack creation and task performance. While a great deal of research exists in the area of budgeting, to our knowledge, no prior studies have dealt with budget settings in a collective (e.g. small group or cross-functional team) environment. Accordingly, the current study examines differences in slack creation and task performance using a two (decision mode: individual vs. collective decision) by two (incentive contract: slack-inducing vs. truth inducing) between-subjects experimental design. A total of 295 students participated in the experiment (79 individuals and 72 three-person collective units). As expected, individuals and collective decision-makers created significantly more slack under a slack-inducing contract than a truth-inducing contract. Additionally, as anticipated, collective decision-makers created more slack than individuals under a slack-inducing contract. Unexpectedly, however, collective decision-makers created more slack than individuals using a truth-inducing contract. Task performance was significantly different between individuals and collective unit members, such that performance of former exceeded latter, as hypothesized. Finally, preliminary analysis indicated that choice shift occurred in the collective units, such that the units became more cautious in setting budget goals than individuals under both incentive contract conditions.

This article outlines the idea of an individual budget, which is now being promoted and tested by central government. It defines the idea, and describes the practical and policy consequences that may flow from its implementation. It also sets out some of the policy choices that will necessarily emerge from these developments. This article follows on from the earlier article in JIC (February 2005), which was the first article ever published on the subject.

Following the Communities and Local Government (CLG) pilot exercise, all sites remain committed to the concept of individual budgets. There are many positive stories of how individual budgets (IBs) have made a real difference to people's lives, enabling true person‐centred support and informed choices about integrated packages of care and support. There were also impressive examples of creative joint working at site level, where sites adopted pragmatic solutions and worked round obstacles wherever possible. Based on experiences to date, all the pilot sites feel that IBs have a key role to play, but that they should not be considered as the only option for personalising housing‐ related support services and increasing choice. Commissioned Supporting People (SP) services can be responsive and person‐centred, as well as providing consistent coverage over large geographical areas, and some authorities consider that commissioned SP services can work alongside IBs and promoted this model as a viable alternative. More work is needed to understand better how IBs can work together with commissioned services to deliver a seamless service.

This article presents the findings of an evaluation of the impact on service users of a local authority's individual budgets pilot. The local authority has pursued an outcomes‐focused approach to care planning. The research findings suggest that these service users and their families see individual budgets as a very positive development. Service users have been able to gain greater control over their lives, not least in that they are able to determine to a much greater extent how they have their needs met. This facilitates service users' general growth and development, such that they are able to engage more fully and on a more equal footing as part of their families and communities. However, there remain a number of challenges that need to be addressed if individual budgets, or personal budgets generally, are to be rolled out successfully across adult social and health care.

Individual budgets allow the service user to take control and make decisions about the care that they receive. Manchester was one of 13 local authority development sites chosen by the Department of Health to trial individual budgets. The pilot has ended but the scheme remains strong. Here, Caroline Marsh describes how one individual's life has been transformed through the power of choice.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of three different types of budget goals (egocentric individual, groupcentric individual and group) on group performance of an additive task, assigned within an individual budget-based incentive contract. While previous research has established that budget-based incentive contracts motivate higher group performance than piece rate contracts for additive group tasks, no studies, which we are aware of, have considered explicitly the type of goal within this context.

We conduct a 3 × 2 experiment in which we manipulate the presence of an individual goal (egocentric, groupcentric and absent) and a group goal (present and absent) on group performance of an additive task.

Group performance is higher for groups assigned groupcentric individual goals than for groups assigned egocentric individual goals, either alone or in combination with a group goal.

Egocentric individual goals may reinforce an individualistic orientation, which may work against the potential gains from having group members adopt more of a group focus.

This paper considers how groupcentric individual goals may improve group performance. The management accounting literature typically examines just egocentric individual goals.

This paper aims to present a digest of the main discussion points and key findings from a recent Social Care Institute for Excellence report on risk enablement and safeguarding in the context of self‐directed support and personal budgets.

The paper explores how the personalisation agenda and adult safeguarding can work together in policy and practice and addresses some of the frontline concerns about empowerment and duty of care.

Evidence on how self‐directed support and personal budgets can be used to enable people to take positive risks while staying safe and emerging practice is examined. It suggests that person‐centred working in adult safeguarding, along with the mechanism of self‐directed support planning and outcome review, can support the individual to identify the risks they want to take and those they want to avoid in order to stay safe. It is clear that if frontline practitioners are overly occupied with protecting organisations and individuals from financial abuse, this will impact on the capacity of those practitioners exercising their duty of care at the front line. This means that practitioners are less able to engage with individuals to identify safeguarding issues and enable positive risk taking. Defensive risk management strategies or risk‐averse frontline practice may then result in individuals not being adequately supported to make choices and take control and, therefore, being put at risk. Practitioners need to be supported by local authorities to incorporate safeguarding and risk enablement in their relationship‐based, person‐centred working. Good quality, consistent and trusted relationships and good communication are particularly important for self‐directed support and personal budget schemes.

The use of “risk enablement panels” and “personalisation and safeguarding frameworks” are two ways to address some of the issues in practice.

The purpose of this study is to further our understanding of how and why interpretations of budget targets differ from one person to another even in the same business unit.

A qualitative case study research approach is adopted, involving a review and analysis of the literature and interviews conducted among controllers and managers of a highly successful business unit.

Both the theoretical and empirical results suggest that organizational budgetary processes do not provide a similar understanding of budget targets for each person. While some shared interpretations are evident, individual‐level variations occur in the personal and subjective meanings that controllers and managers give to budget targets in their own consciousness, situationality and corporeality. A personal historical basis for understanding may impact a manager's interpretation of budget targets, but the interpretations can also be dynamic and change over time.

The study is both facilitated and limited by its basic assumptions and approaches, and the findings may be most relevant to companies with similar profiles. Nevertheless, the study furthers our understanding of the characteristics of controllers and managers and their perception of the meaning of this important feature of accounting in practice.

It could be highly useful to jointly discuss the intended primary purposes and nature of organizational budget targets. Otherwise, people may understand targets in different and perhaps even contradictory ways, which could in turn impair the functioning of control systems.

This paper contributes to current budgeting research in that it interprets individual‐level differences.