New Public Management: The Story Continues

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

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accounting for profitable prevention—The case of social investments

Lagström

Österberg

2020

“…For instance, the 2008–2009 global financial crisis reinforces neoliberalism's hold over public sector reforms through an expansion of austerity policies (Bracci, Humphrey, Moll, & Steccolini, ; Hyndman & Lapsley, ). Austerity has hit English councils (local governments) particularly hard.…”

Section: The Development Of Pb As a Key Policy To Transform Subjectivmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neoliberalism, accounting, and the transformation of subjectivities in social work: A study on the implementation of personal budgets

Chow

Bracci

2020

This study examines, through the case of Personal Budgets in England, the role of accounting in transforming the subjectivities of social workers through a Foucauldian lens. The findings show how accounting can reshape the subjectivities of social workers serving as intermediaries responsible for the frontline implementation of neoliberal reforms. It does so through an empirical demonstration on how accounting harnesses an individual's autonomy and responsibility to nurture “productive” relationships between citizens and the state. Furthermore, the findings also highlight the vulnerability of social workers’ subjectivities from the installation of an accounting infrastructure with multiple capabilities. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how neoliberal policies transform subjectivities in social work and adds to the literature on accounting's biopolitical role in the reconstitution of such subjectivities. It also addresses the relative neglect of studies examining the role of accounting in neoliberal transformations of social work that, despite its significance for an ageing society and its attendant consequences for public finances, receives far less attention than healthcare reforms.

“…The rise of NPM (Hood, ; Pollitt & Bouckaert, ) in the late 1980s and early 1990s made auditing more prominent in governments worldwide (e.g., Power, ). Today, researchers are debating whether we have entered a post‐NPM world (e.g., Osborne, ), or whether NPM still is evolving (e.g., Hyndman & Lapsley, ), but its presence undoubtedly changed the government steering, including the auditing, landscape. When government increasingly was supposed to handle the what (and perhaps why ) questions, while leaving how questions to managers and abstaining from direct steering, it created a large vacuum for information asymmetries and distrust, thereby generating a demand for increased inspections and evaluations (e.g., Jantz, Reichborn‐Kjennerud, & Vrangbaek, ; Power, ).…”

Section: The Rise Of Auditing and Transparencymentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of transparency in auditing

Licht

2019

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.