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Public library management literature and public administration theory have been unduly influenced by economic thinking appropriate to the private sector but a poor fit to the public sector. In this chapter we attempt to explain that public sector interests are different and that decisions about their future should be made on a different basis. Specifically, this chapter addresses the problem of cutback management and compares decisions made by library managers in the Great Depression to those being made in current economic times. Questions are raised about the approach to cutbacks that typify current public management practices, and it is suggested that new models are needed to help public library managers and trustees deal equitably and efficiently with recurring economic fluctuations and the fundamental changes that these periods sometimes produce.

Periods of fiscal decline present an opportunity for city officials to transform their local government into a leaner and more effective organization by targeting cuts to non-essential programs and services. However, the political nature of the fiscal retrenchment process means that such opportunity is often squandered. Could the application of strategic planning and performance management in cutback management lead to a more focused and targeted budget cutting? Advocates of rational management believe that information gathering, analysis and use in decision-making can help local governments adapt to a fiscal crisis by facilitating targeted cuts in expenditures that preserve administrative capacity, and avoiding across-the-board cuts that trim both the organization's muscle and fat. The results of this research show that rational analytic techniques do matter in budget cutting.

The purpose of this study is to understand how majority employee-owned firms responded to the pandemic compared to firms that were not majority employee-owned. The Employee Ownership Foundation partnered with Rutgers University and the SSRS survey firm to survey ESOP and non-ESOP firms about their responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. A key purpose of the survey was to estimate firm-level changes in employment from mid-January to August (current employment figures were adjusted to August 5 using BLS industry employment trends). The survey also looked at other forms of adjustment and responses to the pandemic as reviewed below. The focus in this study is on the differences between firms that are majority owned by ESOPs and those that are not.

The survey included 247 executives from ESOP Association member companies and 500 executives from an SSRS business panel constructed to be representative of US companies with 50 or more employees. The survey started on August 5 and ended on September 23, 2020.

(1) Majority ESOP firms had employment declines from January to August that were on average only one-fourth as large as for other firms. The difference is maintained when controlling for industry membership. (2) Majority ESOP firms were more likely to be declared “essential,” but the lower employment cutbacks among majority ESOP firms remain among essential and non-essential businesses. As essential businesses, majority ESOP firms were more likely receive Paycheck Protection Program or other government pandemic assistance, but both assistance recipients and non-recipients had lower employment cutbacks among majority ESOP firms. (3) The extent of employment cutbacks was higher for non-managers than for managers, but the manager/non-manager gap was higher among other firms than among majority ESOP firms.

This study supports empirical findings done previously.

This study suggests to non-EO firms what they can do.

This study suggests strengths of EO firms.

A very original and one-of-a-kind dataset.

The era of austerity that has followed the outbreak of the global financial crisis has posed a myriad of challenges for public services, with demands for major cuts in government spending, the delivery of balanced budgets and zstrategies for deficit reduction. The purpose of this paper is to consider how public sector accounting and accountability systems are implicated in the development and implementation of austerity policies. Also, it pinpoints a range of issues that accounting researchers need to be contemplating on the subject of accounting for austerity.

Interdisciplinary literature review, coupled with an illustrative discussion of the changing nature of public sector accounting practices under austerity.

Despite the significance and scale of austerity, public sector accounting research on the topic is in its infancy, with the prominent focus being on how accounting technologies are used to manage austerity. There have been few attempts to debate critically the construction of austerity and to provide alternative accounts of austerity. Accounting for austerity, especially in terms of its implications and consequences, is far too complex and challenging to be categorized as simply seeking to “balance the books”.

As an academic community, we need to be developing understanding of public sector accounting research under austerity across different organizational levels and contexts. Also, we should be framing the accounts of austerity in ways that respect and build on a sound understanding of the extensive available interdisciplinary research on this topic. Key research questions to address include: how is accounting shaping constructions of, and impressions, attitudes and behaviors toward, austerity and the status of governments and public service organizations? What do such patterns of development mean for the roles and contributions of public sector accountants under austerity? Are accounting systems destined to be used primarily as vehicles for cost-cutting, or can they be used as engines for growth and for thinking about public service responsibilities in more socially inclusive forms?

Accountings of austerity in the field of public sector accounting research have been worryingly limited. This paper and the papers in this special issue of AAAJ address such failings, revealing a range of critical implications and challenges of austerity policies for public sector accounting research.

Acknowledging fiscal crises as critical junctures for policy makers, this paper investigates how the recent fiscal crisis has affected the paradigmatic approach to the design of an ongoing governmental accounting (GA) reform.

This paper analyses the Italian GA harmonization as a peculiar instance of an ongoing GA reform at the crisis outbreak. A longitudinal narrative analysis of official documents is complemented with semi-structured interviews with key policy makers and participant observations.

The fiscal crisis is found to play an indirect role in the Italian GA reform, which, promoting centralization of competencies in the fields of GA, determines the intensification of the approach adopted before the crisis outbreak.

This paper extends the knowledge on the nature of post-crisis reforms by highlighting how fiscal crises can work as catalysts for paradigmatic approaches to ongoing GA reforms. This paper analyses the designing of a GA reform, whereas the long-term adaptations and outcomes of the reform are not taken into consideration.

The tight link between GA and financial management issues featuring the current paradigmatic approaches to reforms suggests the need to design GA reforms consistently with fiscal and financial management policies.

Whereas the extant literature on the nature of post-crisis reforms analyses the latter as responses to the former, this paper enlarges the knowledge on the topic by focusing on a peculiar instance of a GA reform that was ongoing at the crisis outbreak.

The paper aims at contributing to the cutback management and organizational decline streams of research by providing an in‐depth analysis of the main challenges that public managers have to address in managing public spending and activity cutbacks as a response to the current financial crisis.

After a literature review of the field, an analysis of the activities of international cooperation between public managers is carried out and the strategies adopted at the global level are compared to the challenges and complexities identified by the literature.

Recovery policies adopted at the international level follow some literature indications such as the clear long‐term forward‐looking focus and the attention to post‐crisis challenges. In turn, the crisis is perceived to have politicized decision making. There are concerns that the pressure to reduce levels of staff and services poses the risk that the public sector will not have the ability to manage future crises.

Much of the discussion on the crisis focuses on macroeconomic policies and the business sector. Public sector policies are a powerful instrument to overcome the crisis. The article compares recommendations from the theory on crisis management, both in the public and in the private sector, with concrete strategies adopted at the international level.

The authors show how to extend difference-in-differences (DiD) frameworks to Granger (1969) equations, a technique that tests for the parallel trends assumption and measures changes in effect sizes over time. To illustrate how these equations work, they apply them to state cutback management decisions in three recessions.

This study applies quantitative methods. The authors estimate DiD frameworks as Granger (1969) equations.

After empirically analyzing recessions that started in 1990, 2001 and 2007, the authors find that states deepen expenditure cuts when economic declines lengthen and tend to make large cuts to specific expenditure categories instead of spreading cuts equally over all service areas.

The authors offer two contributions of methodological value. First, they introduce the estimation of Granger equations to the study of topics in public administration. Second, they show how this technique helps to evaluate the impact of economic declines on state spending. By instituting these contributions, they offer a unique way of analyzing cutback management decisions.

From the 1980s – in some parts of Europe from the 1990s – onward, the new public management (NPM) has been emerging in public organizations including libraries. Since then, there has been a need to develop strategies, to plan budgets and to implement cost and activity accounting as well as benchmarking to compare the library’s processes, costs and activities with those of other libraries. One basic idea of the NPM was to make a transition from focusing on how institutions function to product orientation, to improve the quality of library services, to develop output orientation and to act market and consumer oriented. There also was a need to change from bureaucratic and hierarchically acting organizations to a more modern flexible and lean form of management. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The aim of this paper is in the first part to describe the basic ideas of NPM, their realization in libraries and how libraries have to handle constantly reduced budgets and the risk of being closed down (especially in the “age of austerity”); the second part will show how the University of Eastern Finland (UEF) Library has managed to improve its services with the NPM approach.

Many libraries are faced with serious financial cutbacks on the one hand and with emergent needs to (re)invest in neglected public infrastructure on the other hand. At the same time, they have to develop modern digital library services. Thus there is a need for efficiency, which is put in action via major budget cutbacks. Also many libraries have been closed down since the implementation of NPM ideas.

In this paper, the NPM tools used in the restructuring of the UEF are described and the outcome of this modern management is shown.

How does the era of austerity affect flexibility and control in budget implementation? The execution phase of the budget has remained underexplored in the budgeting literature. Theoretically, a crisis and austerity period may trigger changes in budget execution in one of two key directions: either toward greater control or greater flexibility. This paper seeks to uncover which outcome is more likely.

The authors conducted elite interviews of key officials involved in the budget execution phases in two European countries: Portugal and Austria.

The cases demonstrate that the experience of a fiscal crisis and period of austerity tend to lead to greater control and constrained flexibility in budget execution.

The execution phase of the budget process has remained underexplored in the public budgeting literature, and there has been only limited discussion on how the experience of austerity affects it. This empirical study of Portugal and Austria helps to shed light on that question.