This paper compares audit regulatory space in local government between the U.K.’s four countries – England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It addresses current arrangements and practices, their historical background, and rationales for regulation in order to derive lessons for the future of public audit. It draws on the notion of regulatory space as extended through new audit spaces that specifically

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

Corporations are under increasing pressure to provide information about their corporate social responsibility activities. However, there is limited work on how firms measure the value of their philanthropic giving. The value of a philanthropic act can be difficult to ascertain as it often relates to unique goods that do not have a market value. The paper examines the processes a sample of (mainly family‐run)

Public trust serves as an important foundation for the charity sector, but has been diminishing in many countries. Charity regulation exists to promote public trust in charities, but we know little about how it is implemented by regulators to build public trust. This research examines regulators’ efforts to build public trust in charities by promoting and implementing regulation that increases accountability

This exploratory study identifies that more can be understood about how accountability operates within an increasingly complex non‐profit environment by applying stakeholder theory to managers and their decision‐making in non‐profit theatre organisations (NPTOs). On the surface, this may appear to be ground already covered. Previous research has explored the challenges of achieving more holistic accountability

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

Professions enjoy privileged positions and expend efforts to sustain these in public and interprofessional domains. This research investigates a previously vacant and largely uncontested jurisdiction in the UK charity sector that was claimed, maintained and subsequently expanded by the accountancy profession. We find that the dominant involvement of the accountancy profession leads to a charity regulatory

The third sector encompasses many types of not‐for‐profit organisations (NPOs). This results in a diverse sector, where accountabilities vary and are complex. In this paper, we explore notions of accountability at the micro level of social analysis, between individuals, and enacted through social interaction. We aim to provide detail on how accountability is enacted at this level of analysis, and the

We investigate the link between social capital and business model choice of financial cooperatives (Shinkin banks) in Japan. We identify two forms of business model, which concentrate on the issuance of loans funded by deposits (traditional) and the investment and management of large investment portfolios (new). Traditional business models are more likely to emerge in geographic areas with higher levels

The Office of the Auditor General, Republic of Fiji was founded in 1970 on audit principles and national laws inspired by its former British colonial power. The Fijian Office operates in a challenging national context of coup‐determined regimes, military authority and ethnically‐dividing social practices. The purpose of this study is to uncover the processes and dynamics that explain how this Office

Issues of accountability, legitimacy and trust have remained at the forefront of debate surrounding non‐profit organisations and their activities. The purpose of this study is to review the literature on non‐profit accountability from the lens of organisational legitimacy. Specifically, we ask what we can learn from the literature on non‐profit organisation (NPO) accountability and consider what further

Trust in charities is critical in terms of the health of the sector, and also in relation to the establishment and maintenance of social cohesiveness. Moreover, lack of trust can not only damage the charity sector (having negative impacts on public perceptions and donor giving) but can also undermine attempts at building social capital. Yet, how trust is defined, the various forms that it takes and

This paper contributes to the limited empirical enquiries into the role of accounting in affecting medical professionals’ financial accountability perceptions and related outcomes and performance. It examines the associations among formal and informal feedback processes, managers’ financial accountability, work attitudes, and performance. Results of our survey to a sample of 115 senior medical managers

The accounting and reporting of public—private partnerships (PPPs) is a matter of extensive debate and is associated with a compelling incentive to follow the PPP route for the construction of public infrastructures, rather than traditional public procurement, even if the PPP route is not affordable and fails to achieve value for money in comparison to traditional public procurement. The aim of this

While corruption and lack of accountability are admittedly global problems, there is a way in which African countries occupy a prominent space within this discourse. This position is reinforced by the persistent increase in the levels of corruption in a number of African countries over the recent past. One factor that is understudied in the accounting literature and yet could help to explain the escalation

Performance measurement (PM) systems where local governments performance is exposed to public scrutiny have been demanded in many OECD (Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development) countries. The experiences from the Swedish Open Comparisons (OC) system have been highlighted as a particularly interesting case because it bears similarities with both Anglo‐Saxon countries concerning coverage

This study investigates the multifaceted nature of accountability mechanisms in Australian not‐for‐profit organizations (NFPs), the association between organizational culture and the use of these mechanisms, and the association between accountability mechanisms and perceived NFP social performance. The findings support the theorization of multifaceted accountability mechanisms in NFPs, including upward

Local governments are bringing previously outsourced services back in‐house. Research into explanations for sourcing decisions in the public sector is growing, however, few researchers have investigated drivers of both outsourcing and backsourcing in local public‐governance organizations. In this study we utilize transaction cost economic theory (TCE) and political ideology to investigate underlying

We analyse how public managers interact with external stakeholders during cutbacks. Relying on strategic management scholarship, we develop an argument on why public managers decide for a closed or an open cutback management strategy. In the former, they try to close off the process for external stakeholders, whereas, in the latter, they actively engage with external stakeholders. A multiple qualitative

This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and within public service organizations. The papers in the special issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calculative practices intervene in public services, and thus come to affect the experiences of such actors, offering important perspectives on how the latter act to resist

The first author is Senior Lecturer inAccounting andFinanceatCardiffUniversity. The secondauthor is an independentpublic finance andaudit consultant. The third author is a VisitingResearchFellowatCardiffUniversity. Abstract In recent years, substantial changes have been implemented to the audit regimes for local authorities in several countries. Following the abolishment of the Audit Commission, a

Prior literature on nonprofit organizations (NPOs) has focused on the effect of board composition on organizational efficiency. However, this research is focused on presenting an analysis of the relationship between the financial vulnerability of NPOs and their boards. Although studies of for‐profit organizations have confirmed this relationship both theoretically and empirically, it is a novel one

This paper draws on agency theory, as extended by the social theory of agency (STA) (Wiseman, Cuevas‐Rodríguez & Gomez‐Mejia, 2012), to examine the association between governance arrangements, reliance on government funding, chief executive officer (CEO) non‐profit experience, and CEO compensation in the UK charity sector. We rely on a hand‐collected data for the largest 240 charities and find that

This paper questions to what extent particular calculative practices used for inter‐organisational decision‐making help or hinder boundary spanners meet performativity ideals. It uses programmatic rationalities of government as a framework to study reciprocity between them and the conditions of performativity. Empirical data were collected from healthcare commissioning spaces of English National Health

The development of International Public Sector Accounting Standards (IPSASs) aims at harmonizing public sector accounting at an international level. IPSASs are intended to generate more comparable financial information across national boundaries and minimize differences in countries’ generally accepted domestic accounting principles. Despite the various advantages of adopting IPSASs, the new accounting

Although non‐government organisations (NGOs) play an important role in poverty alleviation, their accountability to beneficiaries (the poor) for sustainable poverty alleviation is often criticised. In the literature, a participatory approach to strengthening NGO downward accountability has been widely discussed and various mechanisms for participation are identified; however, it is unclear how a participatory

This paper examines the conceptual qualities of the framework of ‘objective and results‐based management’ implemented by Danish governmental institutions for the effective performance management of Danish university institutions. Drawing on pragmatic constructivism, we make a conceptual inquiry into whether this framework contains conceptual qualities that may form the basis for effective performance

Given that learning has become a core element in addressing the ever‐increasing complexities in public sector accountability, we investigate two issues in this paper: (a) how learning was involved in the process of disseminating a competency framework (CF) in four state departments in Kerala, India; and (b) an analysis of the challenges involved in this process, using the theoretical insights from

This study examines National Institute for Health and Care Excellence's (NICE) application of cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) for normalizing patients’ access to newly licensed health technologies. Drawing upon evidence from the appraisal of four drugs developed for a rare form of cancer, this study demonstrates that the discourse of CEA provided a medium whereby contradicting ideologies of fairness

This paper offers a unique perspective on NPM enactment. NPM is the key means by which neoliberal policies penetrate society and there is now a considerable literature on NPM in many economies. The influence of NPM tends to be depicted as significant, embedded, and irreversible. This study offers findings of resistance and rejection of NPM by a cadre of politicians who did not accept the trappings

Institutional donors occupy a privileged position among nongovernmental organization (NGO) stakeholders, which enables them to satisfy their accountability demands via donor‐imposed reporting in addition to official NGO information disclosures. This study explores the rationale behind the accountability demands of institutional donors and the utilization of donor‐imposed reporting for building, keeping

In this paper we exploit the complementarities between agency theory and resource dependence theory to investigate the influence of regulatory monitoring on financial reporting quality in the higher education sector. Our setting is U.K. universities. Using 14 years of data over the period 2002–2015, we find that financial reporting quality, (proxied by discretionary accruals), improves with the intensity