Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to reflect various pathways for public sector accounting and accountability research in a post-new public management (NPM) context.
Design/methodology/approach
...The paper first discusses the relationship between NPM and public sector accounting research. It then explores the possible stimuli that inter-disciplinary accounting scholars may derive from recent public administration studies, public policy and societal trends, highlighting possible ways to extend public sector accounting research and strengthen dialogue with other disciplines.
Findings
NPM may have represented a golden age, but also a “golden cage,” for the development of public sector accounting research. The paper reflects possible ways out of this golden cage, discussing future avenues for public sector accounting research. In doing so, it highlights the opportunities offered by re-considering the “public” side of accounting research and shifting the attention from the public sector, seen as a context for public sector accounting research, to publicness, as a concept central to such research.
Originality/value
The paper calls for stronger engagement with contemporary developments in public administration and policy. This could be achieved by looking at how public sector accounting accounts for, but also impacts on, issues of wider societal relevance, such as co-production and hybridization of public services, austerity, crises and wicked problems, the creation and maintenance of public value and democratic participation.
This article, building on governmental financial resilience literature, and using data from a survey of over 600 local governments in Germany, Italy and the UK, looks at the role that external ...shocks, anticipatory capacities and associated perceived vulnerabilities play in determining different organizational response strategies (i.e. ‘bouncing back’ versus ‘bouncing forward’ strategies) at times of crisis. In the face of shocks, higher perceived vulnerabilities will especially be associated with bouncing back strategies, whereas the presence of anticipatory capacity will be associated with bouncing forward strategies.
Points for practitioners
The present study reveals the crucial role of perceived vulnerabilities and anticipatory capacities for local governments that face shocks and crises. While organizational responses in the sense of bouncing back (e.g. retrenchment, buffering, downsizing, cutbacks) are strongly linked to the associated vulnerabilities, the implementation of bouncing forward strategies (e.g. transformation, repositioning, reorientation) turns out to mainly be dependent on anticipatory capacities, which enable organizations to better recognize potential shocks before they arise. This emphasizes the importance of developing wider anticipatory capacities within local governments as a key element to cope effectively under difficult conditions, as well as to build and nurture a financial resilience culture.
Purpose
– Budgeting is central in public organizations. From a research viewpoint, it is an extremely multifaceted and potentially rich field to investigate and develop. The changing institutional ...and socio-economic landscape, moreover, requires a profound reassessment of its roles and features in accounting studies. The purpose of this paper is to review the existing European literature on public budgeting, looking at how public administration, public management, and accounting contribute to current budgeting theories and practices and to advance a proposal on how they can individually and jointly contribute in the future.
Design/methodology/approach
– The authors collect and analyze all the papers on public budgeting in the European context that were published in all the issues of 15 major accounting and public-management journals since 1980.
Findings
– Budgeting has so far played a rather marginal role in European public management and accounting research. Among the existing papers, most focus on the Anglo-Saxon context, look at the intra-organizational aspects of budgeting, emphasize its managerial and allocative functions, either adopt an interpretive theoretical framework or make no explicit reference to theory, and rely on qualitative analyses. Public budgeting lies at the intersections between different disciplines and professions, but this multifacetedness has been largely neglected by the existing literature. These intersections thus offer significant opportunities for future research. Building on the distinction between the intra- and inter-organizational foci of budgeting, between its different functions (i.e. allocative, managerial, external accountability), and between the accounting and the public administration and management perspectives, the authors propose possible future research topics.
Originality/value
– Budgeting plays a central role in public organizations and is used to allocate a large share of national incomes. This paper explores the existing literature and puts forward some potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
This article contributes to the literature on public sector reforms by proposing textual analysis as a useful research strategy to explore how reform archetypes and related ideas are deployed in the ...parliamentary debate and regulations advancing reforms. Public Administration (PA), New Public Management (NPM) and Public Governance (GOV) can be depicted as three different archetypes providing characteristic administrative ideas and concepts and related tools and practices, which lead reforms. We use textual analysis to look into more than 20 years of Italian central government accounting reforms and investigate how the three administrative archetypes have evolved, intertwined and replaced each other. Textual analysis proves a useful tool through which to investigate reform processes and allows us to show that in neo-Weberian countries, such as Italy, NPM and GOV, far from being revolutionary paradigms, may represent fashionable trends that have not left significant traces in the practice and rhetoric of reforms.
Points for practitioners
In contexts based on civil law traditions, the introduction of new reforms appears to be slow and difficult, and is often more successful when it respects extant PA systems, which remain well rooted in the public sector. Decision-makers may want to keep this into consideration when proposing or implementing new changes. From an organizational point of view, this underlines the importance of reassuring civil servants and politicians of the consistency of the ‘new’ proposed models with those they have been accustomed to, and of using the traditional language of PA to explain and introduce new ideas and tools and make them more acceptable. However, this has to be balanced by an actual change in the old systems and routines, using continuity to bring about change and avoiding the re-enactment of merely formalistic approaches.
Purpose
This study explores the everyday experiences of researchers in assessing their own and others' research, highlighting what “good” qualitative accounting research is from their perspectives.
...Design/methodology/approach
The analysis is based on interviews with accounting scholars from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia, with diverse ethnic background and methodological preferences.
Findings
Interviewees pointed to a plurality of practical, and to some extent tacit, ways in which they demonstrate and assess the quality of research, concerning “contribution”, “consistency” and “confidence”, with generalizability being seen as more controversial and difficult to attain. In general, interviewees highlighted the underlying ambiguity on what constitutes good research in the qualitative accounting community, contrasting it to the perceived stronger clarity to be found in the quantitative accounting community. This was seen as potentially strengthening the positions of “gatekeepers” in the accounting communities, and encouraging conformance and “signaling” behaviors, at the risk of hampering innovation.
Originality/value
The main critical issues affecting qualitative research quality highlighted by interviewees concern the engagement with the world of practice, and with theory and literature, the importance of accounting for the analysis of qualitative data and for the messiness of the underlying process, and the implicit search for compliance with editors' and community's expectations and conventions. These findings suggest the need to continue debating how to assess the quality of qualitative research in everyday activities, and reflect on how to promote acceptance and openness to pluralism, in scientific communities, as well as in data collection, analysis, in the theorizing, and in connecting epistemology and methodology.
Gender budgeting needs to become institutionalized more strongly in our societies and public policies. The article suggests some of the possible challenges to be taken into consideration to make it ...'work', including availability of technical capacities and data, securing support in the political agenda, involving stakeholders, balancing spontaneity and standardization, and considering wider sources of inequality.
Gender budgeting has an important unexploited potential. However, much more needs to be done for it to become institutionalized. A stronger commitment by practitioners, policy-maker and scholars is needed. This article suggests possible conditions to make it work.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the European public sector accounting standards (EPSAS) project development path to explore how governance and legitimacy issues intertwine when a new ...standard-setting system is developed. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative interpretative multimethod approach is adopted, which encompasses document analysis and participative observations. Findings The analysis shows the role of governance dimensions, including institutional participation and consensus, in the process for securing the legitimacy of accounting standards and the related setting processes, pointing to the critical issues emerging throughout the development of the EPSAS project. Originality/value The definition of public sector accounting standards poses significant challenges to the accounting profession and regulators alike. A paradigmatic case of such challenges is represented by the decisions to develop harmonised EPSAS. A key contribution of this paper is to connect legitimacy dimensions with network governance, offering a view of the input, output and procedural dimensions associated with decisions to legitimise EPSAS and how these may be affected by network governance.
This volume provides a unique insight into the ways local governments have maintained financial resilience in light of the significant challenges posed by the era of austerity. Taking an ...international perspective, it provides a practical analysis of the different capacities and responses that local governments deploy to cope with financial shocks.
Most literature on the antecedents of misreporting in the public sector focuses on the propensity to report financial breakeven, with limited attention to the regulatory and normative incentives that ...may alter such propensity. This study provides novel explanations for public sector organisations' deviation from breakeven. Its underlying assumption is that misreporting may be shaped by mimetic pressures encouraging conformity as well as regulatory pressures conveyed through soft budget constraints. The empirical analysis includes all Italian public healthcare organisations over 17 years. The findings suggest that public healthcare organisations may manipulate accruals not only to achieve financial breakeven, but also to conform with peers’ financial performance or to worsen reported financial performance in anticipation of a bailout.
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