Prisons,the profit motive and other challenges to accountability

It has been argued that “accountability is the linchpin of the correctional system” (Freiberg 1999, 120) and needs to be a central feature of any prison system. It is here that care needs to be taken. Accountability in its modern manifestation has become a largely technical and instrumental process, yet accountability for prison policies and practices has an undeniable moral component that needs to be addressed in order for public accountability to be meaningful within this domain. In Australia, accountability for private prisons has emphasised performance measures, contractual compliance and monitoring, and this has often led to poor outcomes for prisoners and the Australian community more broadly. The rise of the modern private prison brings new questions surrounding appropriate approaches to accountability, some of which will be explored in this paper. In order to consider the affect of private prisons on the Australian prison system, I have drawn on Chomsky's work on neoliberalism.     

HOUSEHOLD ACCOUNTING AS AN INTERFACE ACTIVITY: THE HOME,THE ECONOMY AND GENDER

Accounting is an interface activity, an endeavour that allows objects and artefacts to attain value (in use or exchange) across the boundaries of different domains. Accounting achieves this transferability for objects; the concept of accountability does the same for people, as peoples' levels of accountability and responsibility are implicated in assessments of their value and in whether this value is recognised in different spheres of life. The focus of the paper is on accounting and accountabilities at home, through exploring their impact on the interfaces between gender, the home and the economy. This exploration is conducted through an analysis of instructional texts on financial management in the home. It is argued that practices of accounting and accountability are deeply implicated in gender relations, in the ideology of the home and in maintaining the separation between the private and the public realms of activity.     

Breakdowns of accountability in the face of natural disasters: The case of Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Cost of the United States at the end of August 2005, was one of the most costly and deadly natural disasters ever experienced by the United States. A breach of levees and the subsequent flooding of the city of New Orleans resulted in the displacement of more than 250,000 people. The death toll exceeded 1800 persons and total damages were estimated to exceed $125 billion. The response to the hurricane by city, state and the federal governments has been severely criticized by many commentators. The purpose of this paper is to examine breakdowns in accountability during and after the storm which were manifested by a lack of communication between government officials and a failure on the part of officials to act responsibly on behalf of victims, many of whom were poor, black and elderly. We also examine whether the breakdown in accountability may be traceable to institutional racism embedded in the history and geography of the city of New Orleans. Following McKernan's (2012) argument, the paper reinforces the need to go beyond a “calculative accountability” toward “the potential of accountability to enhance levels of responsibility for the other” (p. 259). It is this moral aspect to the concept of accountability that was sorely lacking in the response of government officials to Hurricane Katrina.     

Corporate social accountability through action: Contemporary insights from British industrial pioneers

Corporate social and environmental responsibility has become a major contemporary focus of business, government and community attention globally. With this increased attention and activity have come debates ranging across corporate authenticity, legislative necessity, and the scope of appropriate strategies. Through an historical analysis of four leading British industrialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this paper addresses the question of how corporate social accountability can be shaped and implemented by industrial leaders. It finds that while they may be motivated by a mix of business case agendas and their personal philosophical and religious beliefs, their accountability orientation reflects the latter. Social accountability in these cases, emerges as accountability rendered through action, reflecting organisational leaders’ moral responsibility and their connecting their personal beliefs with action for the common good. In the light of parallels between historical and contemporary global industrial environments, the study identifies resonances between historical and contemporary corporate leader social responsibility values, initiatives and accountabilities through action. This opens up the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of motivations for and manifestations of corporate social responsibility and accountability.     

Trust and accountability in UK charities: Exploring the virtuous circle

Public trust and confidence in charities is essential for the achievement of their missions. However, recent evidence suggests that trust in UK charities has been damaged, potentially affecting charities' and the charity sector's sustainability and effectiveness. This paper constructs accountability as an important means of developing, maintaining and restoring trust in charities. Through a series of interviews with charity managers, it investigates the public and private mechanisms used in discharging accountability to, and building trust with, charities' main stakeholder groups. The paper identifies the use of a wide range of mechanisms, often highly tailored to particular stakeholders' perceived information needs, which are seen as critical in this process. It is argued that the use and interplay of these can create a ‘virtuous circle’ of accountability and trust, where each reinforces the other. It is argued that where this is achieved, trust in individual charities, and the sector as a whole, can be enhanced.     

Accountability and corporate governance of public private partnerships

Brennan and Solomon (2008) identify six new frontiers in accountability and corporate governance research to stimulate research. This paper contributes to such research by devising a reporting framework and research agenda that relates to Brennan and Solomon's fourth frontier, sectors and context, focusing on the regulated hybrid organisational forms of Public Private Partnerships, which operate at the interface of the public and private sectors.As the framework shows, these organisations are subject to multiple influences and demands. There is a need for more and different reporting than is the norm under the private sector's decision-useful reporting framework. Although the framework focuses on what Mulgan (2000) describes as the core of accountability, it is not only a financial reporting framework but it also seeks to make concrete Kamuf's (2007) argument that accountability might include accounting through narrative as well as the prevailing numeric evaluation.The paper stresses the need for information to be accessible to the public, and in particular argues that a stream of information between the public and private sector partners needs to be developed and disseminated to achieve accountability for public money that is increasingly spent in the private sector.     

高校领导社会责任审计研究

公共资源的所有权和控制权分离导致了公共受托责任产生,高校受托责任建立在公众与高校领导干部的委托代理关系上,高校领导应当从公众利益出发,将公众托付的财产合理配置到高校的服务社会功能中去。然而目前对领导干部受托责任开展的以财务绩效为核心的经济责任审计,并未体现公共受托责任的全部内容。结合高校的社会属性,本文延伸了高校领导经济责任审计的内涵——社会责任审计,基于公共受托责任理论提出了以功能耦合为核心的社会责任审计目标——高等教育服务社会目标和高校科研服务社会目标;以目标为导向从制度绩效层面来审计领导干部在社会责任履行方面的效率,即高校责任人对所管辖的公共资源有关的教育服务社会和科研服务社会的内部控制制度的决策效率和执行效率负责。     

Accounting activism and Bourdieu's ‘collective intellectual’ – Reflections on the ICL Case

The aim of this paper is to reflect upon the practice of accounting academics as ‘collective intellectuals’ – inspired by the actions and conception of Pierre Bourdieu. While accounting researchers have drawn upon Bourdieu's theoretical contributions on habitus, field and capital, little attention has been paid to his later, more critical ideas and practice of intervention post 1995. As a result, accounting research has yet to discover Bourdieu's work on the ‘collective intellectual’ and, thus, consider its contribution to our understanding of how accounting academics can participate in a form of activism against neoliberalism that would not be in contradiction with professional norms of rigorous research. Rather, activism could enhance academic research.Central to this paper is a reflection on a case of intervention involving a diverse collection of academics and activists who came together to launch a coordinated response to a large-scale industrial disaster in Scotland in 2004. The collective in question took various interventionary steps to campaign for a Public Inquiry into the disaster and seek justice and accountability for workers past and present. These steps are analysed with respect to the methods adopted and the work and practice of Bourdieu's collective intellectual.     

Deconstructing the future of management: Pharmakon,Gary Hamel and the impossibility of invention

There has been a growing tendency to argue that the practice of management must be reinvented in the future in order to energize the creative potential of employees. However, the discourse on ‘management innovation’ attributes a curious dual function to the concept of management. On the one hand, management is portrayed as the ‘toxin’ that can impede innovation. But on the other hand, management is portrayed the ‘cure’ that will heal the defects that prevents innovation. Informed by Derrida's reflection upon the dual meaning of pharmakon, a word that means both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’, the paper engages with Hamel's popular management handbook The Future of Management. Although Hamel attempts to establish a clear-cut distinction between those principles of management that obstruct and those that facilitate innovation, one is ultimately left uncertain whether management is a cure or a poison for innovation. This ambivalence points to an underlying paradox of contemporary post-managerial thinking that is characterized by incorporating transgression into its productive logic.     

The impact of an independent inspectorate on penal governance,performance and accountability: Pressure points and conflict “in the pursuit of an ideal of perfection”

This paper examines the impact of an independent Inspectorate on the enactment, of and accountability for, penal reform in the Australian State of Western Australia. Intended to improve system wide custodial outcomes through the introduction of a privately managed operator acting as standard bearer and innovator, the reform agenda was predicated on an overhaul of governance, performance, systems and reporting practices in the sponsoring department and the state's public prison network. Insights from three credos of imprisonment, theorizations of ‘hierarchical’ and ‘intelligent’ governance and accountability, the interplay of values in changing practice, and the ways in which inspectors establish particular inspection regimes, frame analysis of reform implementation and the inspection regime in action over a ten year period. Using archival material, this research examines how the Inspectorate, in making things auditable, altered perceptions and organizational realities of a network of actors. It is contended that the governance and accountability tensions inherent in managerialism, exemplified in its reliance on ‘neutral’ accounting technologies to incentivise, manage and monitor custodial outcomes, privilege instrumental hierarchical governance and accountability regimes that ignore the rehabilitative aspects of imprisonment. Further, conflicting publicly espoused and privately held values play vital roles in moulding performance in a penal setting, and are fundamental to changing outcomes in networks. The Inspectorate's public values and intelligent accountability regime resonate with the Department's policy objectives and public values, but are shown to have been initially inconsistent with network actors’ hidden private values. The research concludes that the appointment of an independent Inspectorate has facilitated the accountability of those responsible for prison quality and positively influenced the treatment of prisoners. A secondary concern is investigating conflicting propositions about the relative governance, performance and accountability of privately and publicly operated prisons.     

Autonomy,responsibility and accountability in the Italian school system

The attention on education and the management of the schools represent important elements of the overall public sector management reforms in many OECD countries. The Italian school system has been characterised, in the last decade, by a process of granting schools a degree of autonomy in terms of educational, managerial and financial functions. Autonomy goes hand by hand with responsibility and accountability systems of schools. This paper delivers a critical analysis of the accountability system designed intentionally or not by the reform. The reform is based on the assumption that more local managed schools will improve the overall performance, through more autonomy, responsibility and accountability. In doing so, the concept of accountability web and the role of cultural traits in developing forms of accountability are used in order to analyse the context of three case studies. The findings suggest that the reform created a dual-based accountability on schools causing higher level of stress in the organisation, and a misalignment on the accountability web between school manager and teachers.     

Accounterability and the problematics of accountability

This paper seeks to contribute to the emerging stream of literature on the problematics of accountability (McKernan, 2012, Messner, 2009, Roberts, 2009) and the possibilities of accounterability (Kamuf, 2007) by questioning whether and how accounterability can appear as a response to the problematics of accountability's operationalisation. To answer this question, this research considers the problematics of accountability found in the limits inherent to the giving of an account (Messner, 2009), in the ambiguous relationship between accountability and transparency (Roberts, 2009), and in the as yet unresolved contradictions of accountability (McKernan, 2012). Accounterability is seen as a practice of resisting accountability demands while giving an account. Alternative practices arising out of such resistance are inductively identified through an ethnographic study of the day-to-day practices of the Salvation Army used as an extreme case. This case shows how an ideal form of accountability raises more questions than it answers in practice, thereby leading individuals to develop their own counter-abilities. Because accountability to a Higher-Stakeholder appears to be an unreachable ideal, identifying to whom one should give an account of oneself becomes problematic. A working response to the problematics of accountability, accounterability emerges as the mechanism whereby the limits and contradictions of account giving are transformed into the conditions of its realisation: unreachable accountability is transformed into tangible day-to-day practices that may differ slightly from expected ideal conduct. It transpires from this study that the main strength of accountability lies in its ability to absorb and to override its limits and contradictions, transforming them into conditions of its possibility. As such, accounterability emerges as the ultimate manifestation of this strength.     

Accountability in a Free-Market Economy: The British Company Audit, 1886

The relative merits of market forces compared with regulations as the more efficient mechanism for ensuring adequate accountability from business (and non-business) organizations is a subject of keen debate. Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century is regularly cited as an example of how the market will ensure adequate accountability in the absence of regulatory requirements. There is a great deal of speculation but very little hard evidence concerning the precise levels of accountability during this period. This study is designed to penetrate contemporary attitudes and actions by using primary sources to determine the audit arrangements made by quoted companies in the year 1886. It is discovered that professionally qualified accountants generally, and chartered accountants in particular, had achieved a dominant position by 1886, and possibly rather earlier; a finding which is also used to illuminate the question of the nature of the professional accountants' work in the late nineteenth century.     

UK policy coordination: the importance of institutional design

This paper considers the principles that underpin the design of the UK's macroeconomic framework, with particular emphasis on the importance of good institutional design in ensuring effective coordination of monetary and fiscal policy when an independent Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee has operational responsibility for setting interest rates. The theoretical literature on policy coordination finds that the cost of central bank independence is less monetary‐fiscal coordination. We argue that once account is taken of the institutional arrangements, this conclusion does not hold for the UK. In fact, the UK macroeconomic policy framework represents a significant improvement in policy coordination through mechanisms that allow for greater transparency and accountability in policy‐making. Among the measures discussed in the paper is the role of the Treasury Representative on the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee.     

Smaller business governance: Exploring accountability and enterprise from the margins

Smaller businesses now rank higher upon the corporate governance agenda. This agenda places their accountability and ‘enterprise’ particularly at issue. It is only put at issue because of just one possible problematization however. That problematization firstly assumes judicious accountability to be the crux of good governance with accounting at its hub. It secondly assumes that smaller businesses are the very seedbed of any ‘enterprise economy’, virtually irrespective of what form they take, or ‘enterprise’ they display. By then combining these assumptions together, this finally reproblematizes any relationship between accountability and ‘enterprise’, so that ‘de-regulation’ and decoupled accountability liberates smaller business ‘enterprise’ further. Others might question and challenge the very basis, as well as particular formulation, of this problematization however. A better grasp of the greater fluidity and complexity of smaller businesses would make the boundaries of their accountability and ‘enterprise’ more clear and leave their respective margins more suitably exposed. As a key potential instrument for that purpose managerial accounting research might then better inform the debate by specifically rendering these boundaries more visible while also identifying the precise scope for manoeuvre at/across their margins as well. To that end this paper uses certain enabling frameworks to construct and interpret the particular case of managerially accounting for a grown smaller business working across exactly those margins from the perspective of a ‘reflective practitioner’ acting as a field researcher for these purposes. As well as offering fresh insights into how far the boundaries of accountability and enterprise might legitimately stretch, this case calls for more critical thinking about how they might change.     

The limits of accountability

Calls for greater accountability from managers and corporations are regularly voiced these days, both in the academic literature and in public discussions more generally. Specifically, it is often suggested that extant financial and management accounting practices embody a rather restricted form of accountability that falls short of our mutual responsibilities as more than economic subjects. Against this backdrop, this paper raises the question of whether more accountability is always and unambiguously desirable from an ethical point of view. It does so by inquiring into the limits that the accountable self faces when giving an account. Building upon the recent work of Judith Butler, the paper describes the accountable self as an opaque, exposed, and mediated self that is inherently limited in its ability to give an account of itself. Because of these limits, we cannot expect demands for accountability always to be fully met. The paper points to the ethical importance of recognizing this limited nature of accountability and outlines possible ramifications of this fact for practice.     

Does It Pay to Be Socially Responsible? Evidence from Spain's Retail Banking Sector

This paper extends the research on the relation between financial performance and corporate social responsibility in two respects. First, it develops a model of strategic competition that includes consumer perceptions with respect to firm social performance. It is shown that in the presence of a positive valuation of social responsibility practices by consumers, a firm that endorses this responsible behaviour may obtain a better strategic position in the market, along with higher margin, demand, and profit. Second, the model's predictions are tested with a sample of Spanish banking firms. The empirical analysis confirms that consumers significantly value other features apart from price in making deposit and mortgage decisions, particularly a financial institution's social responsibility. A more disaggregated analysis shows first, that not every CSR dimension has relevance for consumers and second, that customers equally value activities that can have a direct impact on their well‐being (e.g., culture and leisure), as well as other activities that can be viewed more generally as public goods (e.g., heritage and the environment). These conclusions are of interest in the debate about a firm's social or ethical activities. It is shown that, provided that consumers value corporate social responsibility activities, firms can improve both their competitive position in the market and their profits by behaving in a socially responsible manner. Therefore, the design and implementation of corporate social responsibility practices could confer upon firms an initial competitive advantage over their competitors.     

高校内部领导干部经济责任审计的审与责

近年来,高校内部领导干部经济责任审计在规范管理、提高绩效、干部评价、廉政建设等方面发挥了重要作用。针对当前经济责任审计面临的形势和问题,如何更好地把握经济责任审计的实质,满足高校内部管理对经济责任审计的需求,本文结合工作实际,谈谈高校内部领导干部经济责任审计的审与责。