| 1. |
- Brorström, Sara, 1982
(författare)
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How numbers of the future are shaping today: The role of forecasts and calculations in public sector strategic thinking
- 2018
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 34:1, s. 17-29
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article examines the role of numbers in forming a city strategy in the case of Gothenburg, Sweden. The article illustrates how numbers make people act and react and shape the strategy process. The study is situated between the theoretical fields of accounting and strategy processes in cities. By relating them to the concept of ‘governmentality’, numbers are seen as helping render the city governable. Because strategizing is seen as concerning the future, the actors involved in drafting the strategy feel free to challenge historically institutionalized practices. The effect is paradoxical: the future-looking strategy process becomes a forum for solving current problems.
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| 2. |
- Collin, Sven-Olof Yrjö, 1957-, et al.
(författare)
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Explaining municipal audit costs in Sweden : Reconsidering the political environment, the municipal organisation and the audit market
- 2017
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Inc.. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 33:4, s. 391-405
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- With the purpose of explaining professional audit costs in Swedish municipalities, we hypothesised that audit costs are partly driven by various signalling and monitoring incentives in order to manage stakeholder relationships. Our model of the determinants of audit costs was tested on data from Swedish municipalities, thus extending the study of audit costs to political organisations in a Scandinavian institutional context. The test supported to some extent the traditional propositions of organisational complexity, risk and market determinants, as well as the proposition of the political environment. Our results indicate that audit costs are used to signal accountability, thereby suggesting that audit as a signal could be managed without managing professional auditors.
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| 3. |
- Cäker, Mikael, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Inter-organizational cooperation challenging hierarchical accountability: The dominated actors in a municipal joint venture”
- 2017
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 33:1, s. 102-120
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- New public management offers a number of solutions to the kinds of problems that public sector organizations experience. In taking an accountability perspective, this paper elaborates on how two of these – strict responsibility for performance, and inter-organizational cooperation – may conflict. The setting for this study is a joint venture with a dominant municipality and six dominated municipalities as owners. The article examines how horizontal accountability processes may influence the dominated owners’ hierarchical accountability. The ability to account hierarchically for the quality of service within budgetary parameters is problematized, when dominated owners may dismantle their ability to demand horizontal accountability.
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| 4. |
- De Fine Licht, Jenny, 1982
(författare)
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The Role of Transparency in Auditing
- 2019
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability & Management. - : Wiley. - 1468-0408 .- 0267-4424. ; 35:3, s. 233-245
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The concepts of auditing and transparency frequently appear in discussions about contemporary public‐sector challenges, but the relationship between them rarely has been examined. This paper argues that transparency might be viewed as both an effect of auditing and a prerequisite for auditing. Broadly speaking, the former tends to be articulated more in the auditing literature—where transparency often justifies auditing—while the latter often appears in the transparency literature. By proposing a distinction between “raw transparency” and “refined transparency,” this paper strives to increase conceptual clarity and establish a theoretical basis for various auditing activities.
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| 5. |
- Funck, Elin K., 1979-
(författare)
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Audit as Leviathan : Constructing Quality Registers in Swedish Health Care
- 2015
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 31:4, s. 415-438
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper explores the rise of an audit practice: the national quality registers in Swedish health care. Based on actor-network theory, the study tells the story of an actor-network formed by physicians in the 1970s who mobilized themselves around a common object; to develop the knowledge-base of medical professionals. However, over time more actors became persuaded of the potential of the network and associate themselves with it, resulting in reformed registers. The study shows how the network develops into a macro-actor, a Leviathan in health care, how this macro-actor comes to affect health care practices and how it contributes towards maintaining a new governance regime.
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| 6. |
- Holmgren Caicedo, Mikael, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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The development of the management accountant’s role revisited : An example from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency
- 2018
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 34:3, s. 240-251
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study traces the development of the management accountant (MA) role at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). In 2012, the agency began a reformation by implementing the Lean management system in hopes of increasing customer trust. The results of this study show that the authority of the MA rests on decentralization and the proximity of MAs to managers, as previous research has shown, and more specifically on a definitional and a moral prerogative that may or may not be awarded to MAs enabling them to act as de facto managers. The study shows how the role of the SIA's operative level MAs changed into a helpdesk function with the role of assisting other groups to help themselves, in this case operative-level teams that had begun performing management accounting tasks. Thus, this study bears witness not to the expansion and hybridization of existing MA roles, but to the reduction in authority and de-hybridization of the MA role, from business partner to a pedagogical role on a consultative basis.
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| 7. |
- Holmgren Caicedo, Mikael, 1971-, et al.
(författare)
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When calculative practices are no more : On the de-accountingization of the operational level of a public sector agency
- 2019
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 35:4, s. 373-389
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This study reports on an attempt to remove management accounting's calculative practices at the operational level of a Swedish Public Agency. Using a Habermasian perspective, the study shows how the agency has attempted to replace the previous accounting practice, which involved target setting, performance management and measurement with a new leadership philosophy, and accounting practices that aim at generalizing the individual's private interest toward organizational interests. The result is interpreted as an attempt to make the individual responsible for the welfare of the collective in which, in its absence, the kind of validity that accounting's calculative practices enable is very much present as a longing to soothe the anxiety and uncertainty brought about by the responsibility to lead oneself.
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| 8. |
- Höglund, Linda, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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A balance of strategic management and entrepreneurship practices : The renewal journey of the Swedish Public Employment Service
- 2018
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley-Blackwell. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 34:4, s. 354-366
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The purpose of this paper is to study the first phasefrom 2014 to 2016of the Swedish Public Employment Service's renewal journey by examining how the agency worked to achieve its new strategy through processes of strategic management and entrepreneurship. We did this through the theoretical lens of strategic entrepreneurship (SE). The results showed that the agency's renewal processes are simultaneously entrepreneurial and strategic. The agency is historically well known for its detailed management and control, which creates several tensions with entrepreneurship. We contributed to previous literature by focusing on the organizational aspects of these tensions and the SE practices of balancing entrepreneurship with strategic management.
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| 9. |
- Jeppesen, Kim K., et al.
(författare)
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The Strategic Options of Supreme Audit Institutions : The Case of Four Nordic Countries
- 2017
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 33:2, s. 146-170
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Based on the theory of professional competition, this paper identifies and investigates four strategic options of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) through a case study of four Nordic national audit offices: a performance auditing strategy; a financial auditing strategy; a portfolio strategy; and a hybrid strategy. The analysis of the Nordic SAIs shows that while one SAI appears to have adopted a hybrid strategy, the portfolio strategy has been chosen by the three other SAIs, although with some variations in the portfolio. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these strategic options for public sector auditing.
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| 10. |
- Johansson, Tobias, Dr. Docent, 1977-, et al.
(författare)
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The relationship between supplier control and competition in public sector outsourcing
- 2018
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Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : John Wiley & Sons. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 34:3, s. 268-287
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this article is to develop theory and contribute to empirical studies about how the effectiveness of bureaucratic controls in public sector outsourcing is contingent upon supplier competition, and why and how this interaction plays out differently for hard and soft types of outsourced services. In previous inter‐organizational management control (IOMC) research there is a contradiction between theory and empirical results concerning how bureaucratic control and supplier competition interacts in aligning suppliers. While IOMC theory suggests competition reduces the need for bureaucratic control, empirical studies clearly indicate the opposite. We extend previous research and theorizing by differing between the outsourcing of hard and soft types of services and by testing the joint effect of bureaucratic control and competition on supplier alignment. The empirical case for testing theory is outsourcing by competitive tendering in the public sector. We use transaction level data from 166 local government suppliers in Sweden. In accordance with our prediction, the effect of bureaucratic control in aligning suppliers decreases with supplier competition when hard types of services are outsourced. For soft types of services, our results indicate that bureaucratic control is not contingent upon supplier competition. Furthermore, we show that when supplier competition is low the effect of bureaucratic control on supplier alignment is stronger for hard than for soft types of services. These results constitute an important contribution to the central notion of the interplay between bureaucratic control and competition in the IOMC literature.
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