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This paper examines the contested value of healthy life and wellbeing in a context of severe austerity, exploring how the value of “Public Health” is constructed through and with material-discursive practices and accounting representations. It seeks to explore the political and ethical implications of constructing the valuable through a shared consensus over the “facts” when addressing complex, multi-agency problems with long time horizons and outcomes that are not always easily quantifiable.

The theorisation, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) scholars and Karen Barad's (2007) agential realism, opens up the analysis to the performativity of both material and discursive practices in the period following a major re-organisation of activity. The study investigates two case authorities in England and the national regulator through interviews, observations and documentary analysis.

The paper demonstrates the deeply ethical and political entanglements of accounting representations as objectivity, consensus and collective action are constructed and resisted in practice. It goes on to demonstrate the practical challenges of constructing “alternative accounts” and “intelligent accountabilities” through times of austerity towards a shared sense of public value and suggests austerity measures make such aims both more challenging and all the more essential.

Few studies in the accounting literature have explored the full complexity of valuation practices in non-market settings, particularly in a public sector context; this paper, therefore, extends familiar conceptual vocabulary of STS inspired research to further explore how value(s), ethics and identity all play a crucial role in making things valuable.

The purpose of this paper is to uncover the right type of organizational slack for innovation. It examines how city managers conceive slack, and how they create slack to facilitate innovation while dealing with fiscal stress.

The study is built around a comparative case study approach to uncover contrasts, similarities and patterns of slack-building for innovation in austere times. It relies on the experiences of 12 experienced city managers. Data are sought from elite interviews and one focus group.

The main finding is that innovation in the public sector does not benefit from slack in general, but from a specific type of slack. The evidence shows that useful slack for innovation is not so much about financial slack or HR slack, but about psychological slack.

This study adds to the literature that the key questions of slack research should not only focus on identifying the “right amount” of slack but also on identifying of the “right type” of slack.

Public managers who want to deal with (fiscal) crises more innovatively might reconsider their perceptions of slack and its value. Rather than operating on a pure cost effectiveness paradigm, they should balance the costs of slack and its innovative abilities.

This paper highlights the social/psychological side of austerity management. It concludes that increasing the ability of public organizations to innovatively cope with fiscal stress is not so much about increasing predictive capacity or financial buffers, but about increasing the mental leeway of coworkers.

In this paper, the authors examine the strategies used to reduce labour costs in three public hospitals in South Africa, which were effective and why. In the democratic era, after the revelations of large-scale corruption, the authors ask whether their case studies provide lessons for how public service institutions might re-make themselves, under circumstances of austerity.

A comparative qualitative case study approach, collecting data using a combination of interviews with managers, focus group discussions and interviews with shop stewards and staff was used.

Management in two hospitals relied on their financial power, divisions between unions and employees' loyalty. They lacked the insight to manage different actors, and their efforts to outsource services and draw on the Extended Public Works Program failed. They failed to support staff when working beyond their scope of practice, reducing employees' willingness to take on extra responsibilities. In the remaining hospital, while previous management had been removed due to protests by the unions, the new CEO provided stability and union–management relations were collaborative. Her legitimate power enabled unions and management to agree on appropriate cost cutting strategies.

Finding an appropriate balance between the new reality of reduced financial resources and the needs of staff and patients, requires competent unions and management, transparency and trust to develop legitimate power; managing in an authoritarian manner, without legitimate power, reduces organisational capacity. Ensuring a fair and orderly process to replace ineffective management is key, while South Africa grows cohorts of competent managers and builds managerial experience.

Research was conducted to investigate whether, and how, political accountability might stabilise when agents are faced with profound changes in external structures such as competition laws and austerity policies.

We performed a field study from 2007 to 2015 in a regional hub in Finland and worked with data from document analysis, interviews and meeting observations. We have used embedded research design, where we apply methodological bracketing as well as composite sequence analysis for field research.

Accountability declined when irresistible external structures were the dominant influence on the unreflective actions of agents-in-focus. With time, however, the agents started acting critically by drawing on structures that could facilitate strategic actions to stabilise political accountability.

The field research and interpretation of the data were limited to the organisation analysed; however, the theoretical arguments allow for analytical generalisations.

The research demonstrates how public officials and political decision-makers can eventually adopt a strategic approach when faced with irresistible change in external structures.

The research demonstrates how public officials and political decision-makers can eventually adopt a strategic approach when faced with irresistible changes in external structures.

The study locates political accountability in the context of strong structuration theory and discusses how it is redefined by external structures.

This paper aims to offer an incremental contribution, augmenting the notion of situated rationality as proposed by terBogt and Scapens (2019). Through insights from empirical data, the authors explore the role of situated rationalities of key individual actors in processes of management control change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted with qualitative data collected in a single public service organisation through face-to-face interviews, organisation documentation and observations.

The findings present the important role of key individual actors in bringing about a new situated rationality in a housing department. External austerity forces combined with actors’ experience rationalities acted as a stimulus to change existing management control practices in the management of public services.

The paper conceptualises “experience” rationality, capturing the experiences of a key actor, including elements of leadership style. Drawing on a story of a complex process of management control change, this paper thus reveals interactions between generalised practices and situated rationalities which were not highlighted by the extended framework of terBogt and Scapens.

This article aims at shedding light on differences in terms of crisis management approaches adopted by the Italian government in order to tackle the two most impactful crises that heavily hit the entire globe in the last 15 years: the financial and economic crisis occurred in 2007/2008 and the health crisis occurred in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the article makes conceptual previsions on the potential impact of the health crisis even though, at this time, it is hard to predict the exact extent of its negative consequences.

The authors implement a comparative approach, in terms of budgetary response, to identify the differences and the consequences of the different responses provided by the Italian government to deal with the two worldwide crises.

While the economic and financial crisis occurred in the past decade required the Italian government to adopt predominantly austerity measures, the pandemic occurred due to the spreading of COVID-19 pushed the Italian government to adopt investment and fiscal policy based on tax breaks in order to allow the re-launch of the socio-economic fabric of the nation.

The originality of this paper stems from the scant research focused on the budgetary response of governments to tackle global crises. In addition, the paper endeavours to demonstrate the consequences of the myopic vision of the political leaders who, as it occurred in the Italian context, mainly aimed at maximizing the results in the short run at the expense of the potential consequences in the long run.

Background: Rising food bank usage in the UK suggests a growing prevalence of food insecurity. However, a formalised, representative measure of food insecurity was not collected in the UK until 2019, over a decade after the initial proliferation of food bank demand. In the absence of a direct measure of food insecurity, this article identifies and summarises longitudinal proxy indicators of UK food insecurity to gain insight into the growth of insecure access to food in the 21st century.

Methods: A rapid evidence synthesis of academic and grey literature (2005–present) identified candidate proxy longitudinal markers of food insecurity. These were assessed to gain insight into the prevalence of, or conditions associated with, food insecurity.

Results: Food bank data clearly demonstrates increased food insecurity. However, this data reflects an unrepresentative, fractional proportion of the food insecure population without accounting for mild/moderate insecurity, or those in need not accessing provision. Economic indicators demonstrate that a period of poor overall UK growth since 2005 has disproportionately impacted the poorest households, likely increasing vulnerability and incidence of food insecurity. This vulnerability has been exacerbated by welfare reform for some households. The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically intensified vulnerabilities and food insecurity. Diet-related health outcomes suggest a reduction in diet quantity/quality. The causes of diet-related disease are complex and diverse; however, evidence of socio-economic inequalities in their incidence suggests poverty, and by extension, food insecurity, as key determinants.

Conclusion: Proxy measures of food insecurity suggest a significant increase since 2005, particularly for severe food insecurity. Proxy measures are inadequate to robustly assess the prevalence of food insecurity in the UK. Failure to collect standardised, representative data at the point at which food bank usage increased significantly impairs attempts to determine the full prevalence of food insecurity, understand the causes, and identify those most at risk.

This study attempts to figure out the factors that contributed to deposing certain elected presidents before the end of their constitutional terms, alongside tracing the new political context that prevailed in Latin America since 1978 and its impact on direct political participation and military behavior during presidential crises.

The paper uses the comparative method to investigate the causes of presidential instability in three case studies.

The likelihood of presidential instability increases when a president enacts austerity economic policies that marginalize large sectors of the citizenry, becomes implicated in acts of corruption and develops a hostile relationship with members of the ruling coalition.

This study integrates the social movement theory with analytical perspectives from parliamentary behavior to explain presidential instability. It attempts to investigate the dynamics of interaction between the acts of furious citizens and disloyal legislators through the in-depth analysis of three case studies.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.

Inspite of the attention resilience receives in relation to public policy and public management, very few studies have analysed the internal mechanics of public sector organisations to see what is producing their resilience. Considering management control systems (MCSs) as the drivers of organisational change, this paper aims to explore their role as determinants of resilience in the public sector. The paper attempts to open the black box of organisational functioning focusing on one complex component.

This paper adopted a qualitative approach for this longitudinal case study. This paper used a mix of primary and secondary sources in terms of direct observation, semi-structured interviews and internal document analysis. This paper used a framework drawing on Barbera et al. (2017) and management control’s constraining and facilitating concepts to explore how anticipatory and coping capacities of resilience are supported and reinforced by MCSs.

Findings suggest that MCSs support adaptive behaviour and assist decision-making by providing knowledge and ready-to-use answers to cope with external shocks. However, this is found in case of the adoption of facilitating MCSs, which empower managers and employees and are based on stewardship roles. In such a context, MCSs played an essential role in shaping anticipatory and coping capacities. At the same time, financial shocks fostered the investment in MCSs, cyclically strengthening or developing new anticipatory and coping capacities.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first attempting to identify how facilitating MCSs, as a driver of organisational change, can make an organisation more resilient. It shows how resilience capacities are generated and strengthened via MCSs.