The Web of Managerial Accountability

Abstract

This article examines how government reinvention affects the accountability of public managers to different stakeholders by comparing the reinvention of federal welfare, education, and environmental programs. It maps the various accountability relationships surrounding public managers and investigates how reinvention has influenced each of them. The findings reveal no consistent pattern of change across accountability relationships but suggest three hypotheses about the impact of reinvention. The hypotheses suggest different ways that administrative reforms affect the politics of public management: They change the balance of relationships and mechanisms that different stakeholders use to hold program managers and staff to account. In the process, they increase some stakeholders' program influence and disempower others.

Performance and Accountability—A Theoretical Discussion and an Empirical Assessment

“…Ministerial accountability is still a highly pervasive 9 medium of accountability, and politics tend to trump performance (Flinders 2001). Page (2006) reveals that overseers and supervisors now monitor compliance with fewer procedures and measure more outcomes. But beyond this generalization, sweeping claims about changes in accountability are impossible.…”

Coping with Complexity: Internal Audit and Complex Governance

“…purposes (Koppell, 2005), stakeholders (Page, 2006), and mechanisms (Bovens, Schillemans, & Goodin, 2014) of accountability. This often leads to the conclusion that "traditional" forms of central control and accountability are either insufficient or outdated (Behn, 2001;Jarvis, 2014;Schillemans, 2011).…”

Discretion drift in primary care commissioning in England: Towards a conceptualization of hybrid accountability obligations

“…In relation to the broader discussion of accountability in the public sector, the focus on hybrid accountability obligations enabled us to present findings that further support a diminishing of public accountability, while pointing to new avenues through which this phenomenon might occur. Accountability scholarship has demonstrated how public bodies are today subject to conflating demands posed by ever growing webs of accountability (Page, 2006). With extant research mostly focused on goal disparity between stakeholders or between the kinds of accountability concurrent stakeholder might ask for, the diminishing of public accountability is usually attributed to the pull of different organisations.…”

“…On the backdrop of managerial reforms, a view that -bureaucratic discretion is the nemesis of accountability‖ (Brodkin 2008, p. 317) is prevalent and accountability mechanisms are often advanced as guarantors of better control, legitimacy, cohesion and performance (Dubnick and Frederickson 2011). With NPM's emphasis on -hands-on professional management, explicit standards of performance, a greater emphasis on output control, and private-sector management techniques‖ (Diefenbach 2009, p. 324), oversight shifted from direct, bureaucratic control over processes towards the measurement and monitoring of outcomes (Page 2006), and holding to account for performance against these measures. However, while formal performance accountability has been promoted as a means of controlling practitioners' discretion, performance measurement approaches tend to lead to the prioritisation of some goals, ignoring others (Brodkin 1997).…”