to James Guthrie and to two anonymous referees.Australian Commonwealth public sector 533 Broadbent, 1997). Provision of this information empowers the accountee in a process which helps "to expose, enhance and develop social relationships" (Gray, 1992, p. 423). The giving of an account is not enough for an accountability relationship to exist; there has also to be a process for holding the accountor to account for actions taken and consequences incurred. Hence, enforcement mechanisms are crucial to accountability. Enforcement mechanisms are related to the power of the accountee. Accountability mechanisms applying to the Commonwealth public sector include: executive and parliamentary scrutiny; accounting and audit procedures; trade practices and competition regulation; price regulation; fiduciary duties of public sector corporate directors; borrowing programmes; international obligations; administrative review; and market discipline imposed through Corporations Law and its related institutional scrutineers (Commonwealth of Australia, 1995, Table 7.1).There are multiple stakeholders with an interest in the accountability of government and, hence, a number of accountees, each with a different interest in the outcomes of public sector activities. The relationship between accountor and accountee is much broader than the conventional shareholder-manager relations of concern in corporate accounting and finance (Benston, 1982). It extends to a complex web of interrelationships with government and nongovernment groups. Some of these stakeholders are consumers of the services provided by the Commonwealth public sector. Others are concerned mainly with the process of ensuring that the accountability system can be "relied upon to transform arbitrary action into the legitimate exercise of governmental power" (Stewart, 1984, p. 13). They wish to preserve the public's "right to know" about the way public sector responsibilities are being fulfilled. Hence, whether and how environmental responsibilities are seen to have been fulfilled depends in part on the nature of a stakeholder's relationship with the public sector organization -as consumer, or as concerned citizen.Accountability can be linked to one, or a number of, structural formsmarket forces, bureaucratic controls, and communitarian ideals (Puxty et al., 1987, p. 275;Sinclair, 1995). Contractual, administrative and communal accountability mirror these structures. Corporations, bureaucratic agencies and families are the stakeholders directly linked to these three forms of control. Each of these stakeholders has a different focus. Corporations use calculative rationality to increase economic wealth in the public sector. Agencies use administrative fiat and persuasion as ways of imposing control by the state. Community groups rely on trust and respect to achieve common values (Pallot, 1992, p. 40;Puxty et al., 1987). Administrative and communal accountability mechanisms promote the group (or society) over the individual and are, in principle, an obvious focus for public sec...
Environmental disclosures of Australian public‐sector entities have received scant attention by researchers. Using descriptive statistics, this paper provides an exploratory analysis of the environmental disclosures of a sample of Commonwealth public‐sector entities. Following consideration of approaches to accountability and expected trends in types of environmental disclosures and levels of disclosure in the public sector, the annual reports of sixty Commonwealth entities, over the ten‐year period 1984 to 1993, are examined. Based on the sample observations, the following results are found: as expected total environmental disclosures increased over the period; on average, budget entities reported a greater volume of environmental disclosures than non‐budget entities; over time there was an increase in internal relative to external disclosures for budget entities; non‐budget entities disclosed less internal environmental data than budget entities; the predominant form of environmental disclosure was qualitative rather than physical or financial; and, finally, seven themes were evident in the disclosures identified, the greatest volume being community education and training, and energy‐related disclosures. Comment is made on the possible reasons for these observations. Finally, future directions for the work in this area are explored, including consideration of possible new accountability structures based on ecological considerations and measurable environmental outcomes.
The aim of this paper is to offer a critique of the proposal of “methodological cosmopolitanism“ in theoretical terms and to substantiate this critique by providing an account of the dynamics of collective memory and identity in postunification Germany. In the first part, we look at the arguments about methodological cosmopolitanism and their derivative, the idea of cosmopolitan memory, illustrated by the case of Holocaust memory. In the second part we look at the case of Germany: firstly at its postwar experience of the attempted construction of “postnational“ identity, and then at more recent trends, contemporaneous with the Berlin Republic, towards a “normalization“ of national identity in Germany. The Holocaust plays a crucial, but different, role in each phase, we suggest. In the conclusion we return to more general themes, asking what the German case tells us about the cosmopolitanization thesis more generally.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.