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This article presents findings and conclusions from a study of the application of “new public management” type reforms in a low-income country context, Ghana. Using case study data from the health and water sectors, including interviews and documentary analysis, it argues that reforms tend to put more emphasis on issues of what to implement and less on issues of how to implement. The evidence provided suggests that some progress has been made in downsizing, decentralizing, contracting-out, and performance contracting in the health and water sectors. In spite of this, the implementation of reforms has been patchy due to capacity constraints. Reforms are fragile and yet to be embedded

This paper uses a stakeholder approach to examine how the role of accounting and the status of accountants changed over a 30 year period (1970 to 2000) in a major Australian government trading enterprise. Data are gathered from semi‐structured interviews with organizational participants and documentation. The study provides support for the importance of stakeholders in shaping organizational processes and practices, including accounting practices, and for the effects of changes in stakeholder constituency and agenda on such practices. The study also provides evidence of the roles accounting and accountants may play in implementing a stakeholder agenda, including both instrumental and symbolic roles, and how the status of accountants may rise and fall commensurate with those roles.

The year 2020 is an epochal moment for governance and public administration. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has upset social and economic life, including the delivery of public services, and eroded domestic and international politics. It comes in an era of uncertainty resulting from the end of the New Public Management boom and a looming breakdown of the contemporary US-defined international order. Against such a sea change, we can hardly take business as usual. Change breeds indeterminacy but also induces reimagining. Any renewal and renaissance of public management has to address the ‘what’ and ‘how’ questions of governance in a low-trust and high-risk society. Both the capacity and legitimacy of the state need to be re-empowered, but no longer through the market. The dual failure of democratic politics and bureaucratic excellence in many countries has rendered the Wilsonian politics-administration dichotomy redundant. Amid the rise of East Asia, there are growing contentions over the conceptualization of meritocracy as alternative systems of governance and public service models seem to be delivering effective rivals. Governance performance may not be predetermined by regime types within a poly-polar world. We need to search for new reconnections, new leadership, a new basis for trust and consensus, and a new public service bargain to avoid getting bogged down in old wine in re-labelled bottle, or another singular universalist paradigm.

New Zealand is a small country with a rich history of pioneering administrative reforms. This chapter describes administrative reform processes emanating from the ‘core agencies’ of the State Services Commission (SSC), Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. It describes the famous New Public Management reforms of the late 1980s–2000s, led by the Treasury that restructured ministries (creating more agencies that are single-purpose agencies), rewrote policy rules (e.g., the same laws for public and private sector employees) and created accountability from agency heads to ministers as well as SSCs who evaluate and re-appoint agency heads. It should be noted that in this Westminster system, ministers provide policy leadership but not executive leadership of ministries. The chapter describes in detail two reform processes led/administered by the SSC since the mid-2000s to increase accountability for ministry mid-term policy and organizational capability targets (performance improvement framework) as well as cross-ministry goals (better public services). These efforts have been evaluated over time as being quite effective and are noted for their sustainability and improvement.

New Zealand is widely recognised as extreme in its New Public Financial Management reforms. Scrutiny of the reformed financial management system reveals its consistency with a controversial political agenda: trade liberalisation of even core social services such as social welfare, health and education. Further, the detailed requirements are systematically biased towards withdrawing from government services (by running them down) and/or privatising them (by artificially inflating reported costs, thus projecting an appearance of inefficiency). The legislation underpinning the New Zealand model was shepherded through parliament by a Minister of Finance who publicly opposed exposing social services to market forces. Drawing on archival records, this article provides a historical account of how this legislation came into being. The legislation handed key levers of power to extend the reforms to the Treasury. Particular attention is paid to the friction within the government of the time over extending the reforms to social policy, and the role of the Treasury. Possibly, some ministers who drove the reforms through did not appreciate their nature. Alternatively, the handover of the levers of power could be perceived as an attempt to avoid blame.

This paper is an attempt to theorise the recent changes to accounting practices in local government in the UK. The principal theory used is regulation theory, which incorporates aspects of hegemony theory and governance. Regulation theory attempts to explain major changes in national economic structures by examining underlying systems of capital accumulation, regulation and hegemony. Central to these structures and systems are the role and operation of the state and its institutions. Changes in economic structures will result in conditions, which favour different governance structures for these institutions; comprising markets, hierarchies, civil society, and heterarchic combinations. Several researchers in these areas have characterised “traditional” institutional practices as Fordist and are associated with a particular approach to regulation. However, the underlying economic structure is seen to be in crisis and a new Post‐Fordist regime may be emerging. Post‐Fordism is associated with new institutional practices, particularly decentralised management, contracting out of public services, extended use of public private partnerships and concerns for value for money, charters and league tables. The introduction of such practices may therefore be explained by the changes in underlying structures rather than as a teleological development of accounting. Moreover, some researchers have characterised such changes as representing a fundamental shift from government to governance. The very nature of the relationship between governance, accountability and accounting may therefore have also changed. These issues are explored in the paper.

In 2016, New Zealand's Ministry of Health introduced the System Level Measures Framework which marked a departure from health targets and pay-for-performance incentives towards an approach based on local, collaborative approaches to health system improvement. This exemplifies an attempt to “overwrite” New Public Management (NPM) institutional practices with New Public Governance (NPG). We aim to trace this process of overwriting so as to understand how attempts to change institutional practices were facilitated, blocked, translated and edited.

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding and tracing institutional change towards NPG which emphasises the importance of discursive strategies in policy attempts to overwrite NPM with NPG. To analyse the New Zealand case, we drew on policy documents and interviews conducted in 2017–18 with twelve national key informants and fifty interviewees closely involved in local development and/or implementation of the SLMF.

Policy sponsors of collaborative approaches to health system improvement first attempted formal institutional change, arguing that adopting collaborative, quality improvement (NPG) approaches would supplement existing performance management (NPM) practices, to create a superior synthesis. When this formal approach was blocked, they adopted an approach based on informal persuasion of local organisational actors that quality improvement should supplant performance improvement. This approach was edited and translated by local actors, and the success of local implementation varied considerably.

This article offers a novel conceptualisation of public management institutional change, which can help explain why it is difficult to completely erase NPM practices in health.

This paper explores the rhetorical practices that are used in the introduction of a New Public Governance policy framework.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to show how a major public benefit entity in New Zealand uses formal accountability mechanisms and informal reporting to justify its existence. The paper is premised on the view that the accountability relationship for public benefit entities is broader and more complex than the traditional shareholder‐manager relationship in the private sector.

This longitudinal single case study of the Department of Conservation (DOC) spans the period from its establishment in 1987 to June 2006. It involves the detailed examination of the narrative disclosures contained in the annual reports, including the Statement of Service Performance, over the period of the study. A number of controversial items that appeared in the printed media between 1 April 1987 and 30 June 2006 were traced through the annual reports to establish whether DOC used impression management techniques in its annual reports to gain, maintain and repair its organisational legitimacy.

The analysis found that the annual report of a public benefit entity could play an important legitimising role. Using legitimacy theory, it is argued that assertive and defensive impression management techniques were used by DOC to gain, maintain and repair its organisational legitimacy in the light of extensive negative media publicity.

This is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between narrative disclosures in annual reports and legitimacy in the public sector. The paper provides a valuable contribution to researchers and practitioners as it extends the understanding of how public benefit entities can make use of the narrative portions of the annual report when pursuing organisational legitimacy.