| 1. |
- Berlin, Johan, 1975, et al.
(författare)
-
Backsourcing in the private and public sectors — A systematic review
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 39:3
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article provides a systematic review of the literature on backsourcing. The aim is to synthesize existing literature in order to compare and analyze similarities and differences in backsourcing in the private and public sectors. The study asks questions about: which methods and theories have been used, why backsourcing has been implemented, and what reasons have been described for backsourcing. The study is based on an analysis of 500 articles about backsourcing and 33 articles in the final data set. The results show that backsourcing is primarily caused by: increased costs, lack of quality, and contract problems in the private sector, along with loss of control, cost saving, and changed strategy in the public sector. The study's synthesis highlights three explanations for how backsourcing is managed and interpreted in both the sectors. The article contributes specifically to summarizing current research on backsourcing, synthesizing how backsourcing has been studied, illustrating gaps in the research, as well as explaining relevant differences between private and public backsourcing.
|
|
| 2. |
- Bracci, E., et al.
(författare)
-
Citizen-centered financial reporting translation: The preparers' perspective
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability & Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 39:1
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years, the urge to make public sector organizations accountable has resulted in a wide range of citizen-centered financial reporting tools that aim to overcome the limits of traditional financial reporting. To date, the debate on these public accountability innovations has mainly focused on the reasons underpinning their adoption from the users' perspective, while how preparers affect accountability in the process of constructing such documents is empirically less investigated. By drawing on Callon's concept of translation, this paper aims to analyze how the preparers of citizens-centered financial reports perceive and translate public accountability into practice. In fact, localized translation of public accounting innovation may reveal divergences and ambiguity inherent in the public accountability principles shaped by concurring actors, events, and technologies. The research is qualitative and interpretative, through a longitudinal case study in a municipality, observing the process of construction of a citizen-centered financial reporting tool (i.e., Popular Financial Reporting-PFR). The originality of the paper lies in its contribution to the debate about how public accountability tools are translated into practice by providing evidence of the dynamics that lead an organization along the implementation path. Our findings confirm that the output of the process is the result of the interaction of different networks of interest. Consequently, the final document may vary consistently from the initial project and the general principles of the framework followed.
|
|
| 3. |
- Brorström, Sara, 1982
(författare)
-
The sustainability shift: The role of calculative practices in strategy implementation
- 2023
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 39:1, s. 3-17
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates the role of calculative practices in the phase of implementing strategies for enhanced sustainability in a city organization. Sustainability as a concept is arguably difficult to handle at the organizational level, becoming a challenge for public organizations in practice. This paper builds on the notion of performativity and follows a strategy implementation process over time in a city, allowing us to see how the sustainability ambitions altered over the observed period. This led to the conclusion that when sustainability is to be implemented, there is a shift towards financial control and calculative practices assume various roles.
|
|
| 4. |
- Donatella, Pierre
(författare)
-
Further evidence on the relationship between audit industry specialisation and public sector audit quality
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 38:4, s. 512-529
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In general, prior research offers empirical support for the idea that audit industry specialisation is associated with higher audit quality in public sector organisations. A limitation in this literature, however, is that inferences are drawn from analyses confined to the audit firm level alone. In order to offer further insights into the relationship between audit industry specialisation and audit quality, and on whether such audit characteristics support the de facto harmonisation of accounting rules and regulations, this research includes both the audit firm and the auditor in charge of the financial audit as units of analysis. The results, based on an analysis of cross-sectional data from Swedish municipalities, show interesting differences between the audit firm and individual auditor levels. It is only at the audit firm level that the results consistently support the idea that industry specialisation is associated with higher audit quality. Although there is no such evidence at the individual auditor level, it should be considered that the results, in part, indicate that audit quality is highest in a situation of joint specialisation. That is, in combination with specialisation at the audit firm level, specialisation at the individual auditor level seems to offer something over and above audit firm specialisation alone.
|
|
| 5. |
- Ek Österberg, Emma, 1977
(författare)
-
Objectifying trustworthiness: Market formation in the transport policy field
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 36:1, s. 3-19
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper addresses market formation in the public sector, particularly questions of how and why market arrangements for public services change, and what it means in terms of governance. The paper presents an in-depth empirical study of a case in the Swedish transport sector, building on sociological research into market formation, particularly the work of Callon, Méadel, and Rabeharisoa on the qualification of products. Given the demand for process-oriented research into market relations, especially in the public sector, this study empirically illustrates how and why roles, relations, and objects are maintained and transformed, and how these features are cocreated in practice. Although previous research has paid relatively little attention to product qualification, this paper demonstrates that it is useful to put this process at the center of the analysis. The present findings emphasize that how products came to be objectified, in terms of provider qualities rather than technical specifications, was the compromise that enabled various logics to be at stake simultaneously. The paper also contributes by demonstrating that NPM reforms of marketization can accommodate far-reaching attempts by public organizations to influence the market, which is especially relevant in markets in which public-sector organizations are dominant purchasers. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
|
|
| 6. |
|
|
| 7. |
- Funck, Elin K., 1979-, et al.
(författare)
-
Twenty-five years of studying new public management in public administration: Accomplishments and limitations
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 36:4, s. 347-375
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In 1991, Christopher Hood made a substantial contribution to pub- lic administration research when he formulated the concept of new public management (NPM). His article can in many ways be understood as an enabler of research focused on public sector reforms. To this day, numerous articles and books have been published, discussing the concept itself and the empirical phenomenon. In celebration of the 25-year period since the concept of NPM was introduced, this article revisits the current knowledge through a systematic literature review of 299 articles published between 1991 and 2016. This approach enables a meta-analysis of research published in five topranked international public administration journals. We identify four important themes as emerging from our review: (a) a reform with a vague intention, (b) the limping concept, (c) the one-sided perspective, and (d) NPM as the new norm. An important effect of this is that Hood’s framework may have been curtailed, leading to a distorted knowledge base when it comes to future studies.
|
|
| 8. |
- Glenngård, Anna, et al.
(författare)
-
Exploring healthcare authorities’ decisions to sustain or abandon a management control initiative
- 2024
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability & Management. - : John Wiley and Sons Inc.. - 1468-0408 .- 0267-4424. ; 40:2, s. 173-173
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We explore how a management control initiative travels across and is translated within organizations—from the decision motives for adoption or rejection to the subsequent decision motives for sustaining or abandoning the control—through the lens of diffusion theory. Our empirical case is the journey of activity-based funding of hospitals across 21 Swedish healthcare authorities. We develop a framework in which the abandonment or sustainment of a management control is explained by the interplay between the decision motive underlying the adoption and the propensity to continuously adapt it in response to new organizational goals and circumstances. This propensity is determined by fits and misfits between organizational characteristics and properties of the control.
|
|
| 9. |
- Graaf, Johan, et al.
(författare)
-
Mapping and contesting peer selection in digitalized public sector benchmarking
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley. - 1468-0408 .- 0267-4424. ; 38:2, s. 223-251
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates the influence of digitalization on different modes of peer selection in public sector benchmarking. We do so in the context of a field study of the impact of "Kolada"-a digital database and benchmarking device comparing the performance of Swedish municipalities. We find that the municipal quality controllers often used algorithmically selected peer groups to identify "pure" performance gaps for a range of performance indicators. Politicians, departmental managers, and the citizenry, however, continued to prefer benchmarking against neighboring municipalities. Drawing on Gieryn's concept of cultural cartography, differences in peer selection are characterized as a form of credibility contest between digitally generated and local maps. Our paper contributes to the literature in three main ways. First, we demonstrate how peer selection involves a mutual interplay between new digitally generated, abstract maps of performance and local cartographic legacies sustained by complex social attachments. Second, our paper illustrates the importance of often overlooked social ties informing processes of peer selection, highlighting the importance of professional ties, neighborly familiarity, and affective relations. Third, our paper characterizes the power of "native truths." More generally, our paper indicates the epistemic authority of digital "truths" is contestable and may be resisted. Ultimately, the coexistence of "old" and new epistemic maps confers choice, which contributes to the legitimacy of new technologies enabling digitalized benchmarking to persist in shifting and locally meaningful ways.
|
|
| 10. |
- Hasselbladh, Hans, 1961-, et al.
(författare)
-
Representing and intervening in Swedish education-Mediating and adjudicating by grading numbers
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Financial Accountability and Management. - : Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Inc.. - 0267-4424 .- 1468-0408. ; 36:1, s. 20-32
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Educational reforms are attempts to transform and reconstitute conceptions of knowledge, the practice of teaching and the forms of subjectivity associated with being a teacher, pupil, and parent. We will investigate a particular aspect of the extensive changes that have swept across the landscape of Swedish education over the last decades. We will show how the grading system has come to fulfill a mediating role between progressivist educational ideas and neo-liberal notions of individual choice and entrepreneurship, by way of adjudicating and mediating educational performance for individual pupils, schools, and the education system at large. The aggregated output of the grading system is used for instrumental purposes such as performance management, quality management, and bench marking in the school system. Grading and its associated practices extend throughout the entire school system, defining success and failure from individual classrooms to the national level as the dominant form of representing school performance. The grading system was initially intended to reshape the inner workings of education in Sweden but subsequently became the "gold standard" deployed in various managerial practices. Our analysis demonstrate the performative powers when seemingly innocent techniques are put to use in public sector reforms and new worlds are made and unmade by complex constellations of seemingly mundane techniques and ideational frameworks.
|
|
