Search results

Neighborhood governance has become a widespread approach to improving the quality of life in cities. The idea is that sustained interactions between public professionals and residents will better meet the needs of local areas and people. However, neighborhood working approaches purporting to provide tailor-made policies and solutions tend to perpetuate habitual practices and hegemonic institutions of hierarchy and competition. This chapter enquires how conditions can be created for different kinds of conversations and relationships to emerge that lead to innovative practices and sustainable change. I argue that public professionals need not only interact extensively with residents but should also engage in encounters with an open mind. Empirically illustrated with an innovative approach to neighborhood working in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), I explain how they can go beyond habitual practices by letting new shared views and actions emerge in-between them. Doing so fosters deeper institutional transformations toward a relational grounding for urban governance and public administration.

The authors aim to contribute to conceptual and empirical understanding of publicness in public sector accounting research by analysing how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values of the UK tax authority.

The authors develop a conceptual framework for analysing public values in terms of relational power. Combining governmentality and actor–network theory, the authors focus on the complex relationships through which human and non-human actors interact and the public values that emerge from these evolving socio-material networks. Based on a critical-interpretivist ethnographic study of interviews, documents and secondary survey data, the authors identify the emergent properties of accounting technologies in their case study.

The authors explain how accounting technologies facilitated the transformation of public values in the tax authority by reshaping relational power. Traditional public values were eroded and replaced by neoliberal values through a gradual change process (“frog in the pan”) of (1) disconnecting workers and citizens both spatially and socially; (2) losing touch with the embodied nature of tax administration; and (3) yielding to a dehumanising performance management system. Neoliberal accounting technologies transformed the texture of relationships in such a way that workers and citizens became disempowered from effective, accountable and humane tax administration.

Further research is needed that gains wider access to tax authority workers, extends the scope of the empirical data and provides comparisons with other tax authorities and public sector organisations.

The authors show that a relational approach to public values enables identification of what is “valuable” and how public sector organisations can become “value-able”.

The authors offer an interdisciplinary conceptualisation of publicness based on public administration literature, develop a relational conceptualisation of public values and provide original empirical evidence about the changing publicness of the UK tax authority.

The study explores the role of accounting technologies of government (ATGs) associated with UK Tax Credits and their impact on claimants' motivations, behaviour and identities. The aim of this study is to deepen empirical and conceptual understandings of how ATGs of tax authorities transform claimants into “entrepreneurs of the self”.

The authors approach Tax Credits (TC) as a case study to examine how ATGs articulate and operationalise neoliberal ideology through a complex network of inscription devices, expertise and locales. They adopt an ethnographic approach based on interviews, archival data and field notes to gain a deep understanding of citizens' lived experiences of ATGs when claiming Tax Credits.

The authors find that ATGs play a key role in transforming TC claimants into self-disciplined “citizen-subjects” whose decisions are informed by market logic. When claiming TC, citizens interact with ATGs and are transformed into “entrepreneurs of the self” who internalise neoliberal ideology and associated beliefs and assumptions of poverty, work and the welfare state. In this process of subjectification, ATGs (re)construct their identities from welfare recipients to “responsible” and “accountable” hardworking individuals and families. However, ATGs perversely disempower claimants who lack the required human capital for becoming responsible for their own welfare, and thus ultimately maintain socio-economic inequality.

Participants were drawn from a relatively narrow geographic area.

The authors reveal how accounting as a technology of government (dis)empowers individuals vis-à-vis the state and spurs inequality dependent on personal circumstances and calculative skills.

The authors contribute to the accounting literature by showing how neoliberal ideology is articulated, operationalised and reinforced by dynamic and repetitive interactions with ATGs of the UK TC scheme. The study helps deepen the understanding of the processes through which socially and economically disadvantaged individuals are transformed into self-governing economic agents responsible for their own welfare.

Governance network managers are charged with triggering and sustaining collaborative dynamics, but often struggle to do so because they come from and interact with hierarchical and competitive organizations and systems. Thus, an important step toward effectively managing governance networks is to clarify collaborative dynamics. While the recently proposed collaborative governance regime (CGR) model provides a good start, it lacks both the conceptual clarity and parsimony needed in a useful analytical tool. This theoretical chapter uses the logic model framework to assess and reorganize the CGR model and then amends it using Follett’s theory of integrative process to provide a parsimonious understanding of collaborative dynamics, as opposed to authoritative coordination or negotiated cooperation. Uniquely, Follett draws from political and organizational theory practically grounded in the study of civic and business groups to frame the manner in which integrative process permeates collaboration. We argue that the disposition, style of relating, and mode of association in her integrative method foster collaborative dynamics while avoiding the counterproductive characteristics of hierarchy and competition. We develop an alternative logic model for studying collaborative dynamics that clarifies and defines these dynamics for future operationalization and empirical study.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had major impacts on the performance of construction projects that have adopted social distancing measures. This study examines the effect of social distancing measures on project schedule performance through job reorganization on construction project sites.

Responses were obtained through a survey of 154 construction projects and analysed using the partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) technique.

The findings established that social distancing has a negative effect on schedule performance, social distancing has a positive effect on job re-organization and job re-organization has a positive effect on schedule performance. Additionally, the results indicate that job re-organization partially mediates the relationship between social distancing and schedule performance, while social distancing moderates the relationship between job re-organization and schedule performance with low social distancing having the stronger positive effect.

This study contributes theoretically to a greater understanding of the impact of adopting COVID-19 safety measures such as social distancing on the schedule performance of construction projects. The study also shows how social distancing could lead to schedule performance through job reorganization.