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This study aims to examine the role of financial management practices, which consist of financial disclosure, internal control, financial planning and budgeting and financial performance on Islamic social enterprises’ (ISEs) accountability.

Questionnaires were administered to financial officers of 102 Malaysian ISEs. Findings were analysed using Smart-PLS to examine the relationships between financial management practices and accountability.

Results of this study indicate a direct relationship exists between internal control and accountability. Relationships between other financial management practices and accountability are indirect through internal control. Hence, the data demonstrates that internal control has a mediating role on other financial management practices, which are financial disclosure and financial performance management with the accountability of ISEs.

This study has implicated the significant role of financial management practices in ISEs in the pursuance of their accountability especially internal control to achieve public trust.

Appropriate financial management practices, especially internal control, are essential for the ISEs to achieve good accountability.

This study contributes to the field of management and social accounting by providing empirical evidence on ISE practices specifically on financial management practices and accountability. This framework thus presents among the early attempts in studying accountability issues in ISEs.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss why public sector reforms hybridize during implementation processes, consequences on accountability relations and practitioners’ and policymakers’ reactions to these changes.

The paper considers experiences from three initiatives related to the governance reform in the Norwegian hospital sector. Data were collected via interviews and document studies, and all three cases were longitudinal studies.

Unexpected consequences of reform initiatives and contextual changes are causing controls to hybridize and having profound effects on accountability relations. However, the gradually alignment of controls in a dynamic pattern of hybridization enables the balancing of conflicts in the chain of accountabilities. Hybrid controls are observed to emerge as stronger than the initial ideal control models. The longitudinal studies of control hybridization illuminate the sector’s survival in the long run, as they allow for adaptation to changes in contexts.

This work augments leaders’ understanding of how governmental strategies may follow diverse paths and yield results that diverge from intentions. Narrow accountability bases inhibit the government from implementing political decisions through agencies. Conversely, agents must relate to direct control from authorities. The predictability of agents’ decision space is reduced, and the control process becomes more ambiguous.

Through connecting what happens in agencies with accountabilities in the political level, it is possible to study the flexible nature of accountability relations and why controls hybridize. The paper underlines the need for longitudinal studies to describe complex patterns of reform initiatives.

This study investigates state institutions' influence on corporate accountability and control practices in a rural African context. Exploring the different rationales behind state existence in the context of sugar production in Egypt, this work clarifies how accountability is practised differently in the case of the high centrality of state logics in the business sector.

Theoretically, the study draws insights from the institutional logics perspective. Following the case study approach, data are collected through interviews, observations and documents.

The study found that state institutions can play a supportive rather than a mere constraining role in the management, accountability and control processes. Notably, it clarified how state-related institutions were highly central and influential in a way that enabled them to curb the (negative) influences of the community and business institutions. In this context, it is social – rather than functional – accountability which emerges as the central control practice to achieve answerability and enforcement.

Thus, this study's reported findings confirm the role of institutional (political) logics as supportive in society.

Motivated to know more about the internal means through which accountability for sustainability takes shape within organisations (in what ways and by whom), this paper aims to explore how accountability for sustainability is constructed within an organisation during a process of establishing a control system for sustainability.

This paper adopts a qualitative case study approach of a decentralised industrial group, operating mainly in Scandinavia, between 2017 and 2020. Both primary and secondary data are used (e.g. document analyses, semi-structured interviews, informal conversations and site visits) to inform the findings and analysis.

The findings reveal a multi-faceted path towards accountability for sustainability that involves several concerns and priorities at organisational and individual levels, resulting in a separate sustainability control systems within each subsidiary company. Although hierarchical structures for accountability exist, socialising accountability activities are needed to (further) mobilise sustainable accounts.

Successful sustainable control systems require employees making sense of formalised accountability instruments (e.g. policies and procedures) to establish their roles and responsibilities in organisations.

This paper proposes socialisation processes as important for driving forward sustainability solutions.

This study elaborates on the internal accountability dynamic for the construction of sustainable accounts. Its novelty is built upon the interaction of hierarchical and socialising accountability forms as necessary for establishing a control system for sustainability. It furthermore illustrates the relationship between the external and internal pathways of accountability.

Before the imposition of the NHS internal market, systems of accountability and control were far from adequate and could be criticized on a number of grounds. The market was offered as a panacea to address these inadequacies. However, in practice there have only been partial improvements which could have been achieved without the imposition of the market. The market also creates new problems and a number of crises and scandals seem to be addressed at the political level by pleas to utilize resources more effectively. These pleas mean that more and more the focus is turning back to central planning in the provision of care and further away from so‐called market mechanisms. The NHS “managed” market has been imperfect and will continue to be so. Argues that there is no alternative but to return to the planned provision of health care in order to improve on accountability and control in the NHS. Hopefully the adverse impact of the market on clinicians and others will force a more rational reappraisal of the fundamental raison d’être of the NHS and the need for those involved in the delivery of services, at all levels, to be more openly accountable.

This paper seeks to extend understanding of how being responsible and accountable for performance impacts on control processes between organisations.

The paper analyses empirical findings gathered from officers of two local education authorities about their control relationships with schools. It provides a Habermasian theoretically informed analysis of these control relationships. Control is studied as the steering processes that occur between organisations in response to regulation from government.

The LEA officers employ the language of influence to conceal ongoing direct forms of control over schools. As the officers attempt to demonstrate their accountability to the Department of Education and Skills, they use communication and information strategically to steer schools towards their ways of thinking.

The paper focuses only on the views of LEA officers. Further research is required to ascertain the views of schools and other stakeholders in local education.

Where regulatory bodies demand performance accountability from organisations, appropriate control mechanisms are necessary to ensure that organisations work in transparent ways towards regulatory objectives.

Steering, responsibility, accountability and control are discussed in an educational context.

With performance as a core theme of public sector reforms, this article explores performance management systems in inter-organizational settings while testing the effect of performance measurement on its use for accountability and control. Using economic neo-institutional perspective in a hierarchical context with turbulent political history, the article investigates the variations in the use of performance information in inter-institutional settings across different legal categories of state organizations.

The performance management framework of Van Dooren et al. (2010) is employed as the basis for this research that explains the link between performance measurement and use. To explore the management of performance in Pakistan, the survey data was collected in 2018; after two democratic governments completed their tenures.

The research indicated a lower extent of performance measurement and use by the parent ministries in the democratic regimes. This finding adds to the implications of economic institutional theory in a politically turbulent context, where political actors place less emphasis on performance and more emphasis on procedures. It was confirmed that the ministries use the measured performance information for accountability and control on the results, but the moderating role of legal categories in the performance framework did not get confirmation.

The article empirically tests the performance management framework from a Western context in a developing country that has not been discussed frequently in the performance management systems literature.

To examine control and accountability in an expressive organisation.

The paper was based upon a longitudinal case study of events in the Church of England from 1994 to 2001 and was based on documents, debates in the governing body, conversations and interviews and participants' observation.

As a response to a financial crisis a group of financiers from within the Evangelical theological tradition (which places stress on headship and control) proposed the creation of a new church governance body (a national council) with strongly integrated central control and severely diminished conciliar participation. This group described the complex church organisations and structures (disparagingly) as “a cats cradle of autonomous and semi autonomous organizations”. This conflicted with the values of the other covenant traditions (Anglo‐Catholic and Liberal). The new body was created, but the proposed centralised control was unraveled, the existing constitution and governance was maintained, the “cats cradle” was enriched within the ground metaphor of autonomy. The case shows how the loosely coupled nature of this expressive institution with its multiple theological (value and belief) stances and multiple organisations, relationships and accountabilities was almost impervious to the attempt to shift them into an ordered and controlled hierarchy.

The great complexity of an ancient Church constrains the researcher to a limited account.

Change in expressive organisations happens by emergent negotiation and cannot be directed because the various value positions infuse everything.

The conception of control and accountability as being constructed and reconstructed in the interplay of the constructs of covenant, constitution and contract. This theorising may have a wider application both to expressive, public institutions and private organisations.

In the past decades, Dutch public sector organizations (PSOs) have been encouraged to become more “business-like” in their internal control and accountability processes, following a more general trend toward New Public Management (NPM) in Western societies. However, in the Netherlands, this trend has met with increasing resistance and discontent among public sector professionals. In this chapter, a framework is developed that enables these public sector professionals themselves to discuss and reflect on their internal control and accountability processes, and possibly to effect changes in it.

The chapter contains a critical analysis of existing research on management control, accountability, and learning in PSOs and describes a reflection and discussion session with a group of senior staff employees at a Dutch university, employing the framework developed in this chapter.

It is argued that, generally speaking, the “business-like” approach of NPM does not appear appropriate for most public sector activities and may even negatively affect accountability and learning in PSOs.

The chapter critically assesses the impact of NPM on PSOs and provides an alternative to NPM in the form of experimentalist governance, with possible positive implications for the effectiveness of public sector activities.

This chapter is among the first to adapt a framework, developed for scientific and descriptive use, for more practical and prescriptive purposes, that is, as an instrument for public sector professionals to discuss and reflect on their internal control and accountability processes.

The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: first, what contracts, instruments and accounting activities constitute Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy in practice? Second, how are notions of legitimacy and accountability mediated through the network constituted by this policy?

The paper is located in the critical interpretivist approach to accounting research. It is based on an exhaustive documentary analysis. Policy documents, contract documents, records of parliamentary inquiries (Hansard) and legislation were analysed drawing on a network policy perspective.

The paper finds that the Australian Government has sought to escape its accountability obligations by employing a range of approaches. The first of these approaches is the construction of a network involving foreign states, private corporations and non-government organizations. The second is through a watered down accountability regime and refusal to be accountable for the day-to-day life of asylum seekers in offshore processing centres through a play with the meaning of “effective control”. Yet while the policy network seems designed to create accountability gaps, the requirement within the network to remain financially accountable undermines the governments claims not to be responsible for the conditions in the detention camps.

The paper focuses largely on the period starting from when Kevin Rudd became Prime Minister to the death in Papua New Guinea of asylum seeker Reza Barati on 17 February 2014. Earlier periods are beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper will result in the identification of deficiencies inhuman rights accountability for extra-territorialized and privatised immigration detention and may contribute towards the formulation of effective policy recommendations to overcome such deficiencies. The paper also provides empirical data on, and academic understanding of, immigration detention outsourcing and offshoring.

The paper will inform debate regarding treatment of unauthorized maritime arrivals and asylum seekers generally.

The paper provides the first detailed and full understanding of the way Australia’s offshore asylum seeker processing policy is practiced. The paper also provides an empirical analysis of the way national policy and its associated accountability mechanisms emerge in response to the competing legitimacy claims of the international community and national electorate.