Accounting for profitable prevention—The case of social investments

Abstract

Contemporary developments in public administration imply an increasingly multifaceted and intangible context for public service delivery. Yet, there is a continued emphasis on calculative devices in this changing public landscape which urge for a broadened perspective, beyond that of New Public Management (NPM), on the role and consequences of accounting in the attainment of public goals, in particular, in relation till wicked problems. This article reports an indepth study of social investments, a governing model which aims to make visible the value of long-term effects of preventive social work. The article focuses on microlevel dynamics and activities undertaken by key actors during the implementation process, using an institutional work perspective, in particular, the concepts of political, technical, and cultural work. The analysis shows that the ambition to calculate the profit of preventive social work was largely underpinned and facilitated by a problematization of NPM features. This supports recent calls for further research on public sector accounting that explores, rather than presumes, the logics and rationales to which accounting techniques are connected. The study also complements literature on wicked problems by linking the use and perceived usefulness of calculative practices with the attempts of attaining complex goals in the public arena. K E Y W O R D S calculative practices, economization, new public management, publicness, social investments, wicked issues

Is Institutional Research on Management Accounting Degenerating or Progressing? A Lakatosian Analysis*

“…Similarly, Le Theule and Lupu (2016), illustrate how accounting practices, which were embedded in the emergent market logic in the field of publishing, began to encroach on the editorial process in a publishing firm and how this reinforced the marginalization of the previously dominant editorial logic and changed the institutionalized nature of publishing. In contrast to other recent advances exploring the constitutive role of accounting, such as those emerging in research on institutional work (Lagström and Ek Österberg 2020), these studies show that detailed attention to this role can be combined with a strong sense of institutional embeddedness and that such analyses do not need to degenerate into overly actor-centric accounts. However, in analytical terms, they are limited to how institutional logics are transposed from the institutional field level to individual organizations and do not capture the reciprocal relationships unfolding between these levels of analysis.…”

New developments in institutional research on performance measurement and management in the public sector

“…This may, in turn, lead to a valorisation of the agency involved in devising PMM practices as a largely unfettered force, which would be alien to most institutional theorists (Greenwood et al , 2017). One example of researchers falling prey to this risk can be found in Lagström and Ek Österberg’s (2020) study of the evolution of social investment in Swedish local government. Whilst drawing on both institutional theory and sociological research emphasising the constitutive role of accounting (e.g.…”

“Managing” wicked problems: Uncovering the roles of budgets, financial systems, and collaboration

“…Also investigating the effects of NPM reforms in relation to the management of wicked problems, Lagström and Ek Österberg (2020) explore the implementation of social investments as a method to manage wicked problems and to measure the value of preventive work. The study focuses on how social investments are problematized and argued for in the context of a county region.…”

“…Both the article by Newberry (2020) and the one by Lagström and Ek Österberg (2020) provide us with more context‐specific analyses of the roles of financial systems for managing wicked problems. On a similar note, Lloga Balep and Junne (2020) explore the use of accounting for managing wicked problems at the micro level.…”

“…Much like other contributions in this special issue, the study by Chow and Bracci takes the neoliberal ideas associated with NPM as their reference point. Chow and Bracci also, like Lagström and Ek Österberg (2020), choose to analyze this wicked problem at the micro level by focusing on how the subjectivity of individual social workers are influenced by accounting reforms. The results of the study by Chow and Bracci show how the use of budgets change the behaviors of social workers as well as that of clients, thus altering the relationship between the state and users of these services.…”