Making sense of New Zealand’s ‘spirit of service’: social identity and the civil service

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the creation a more unified civil service in New Zealand with the Public Service Act 2020, which promotes the most profound changes to the public service since New Zealand’s New Public Management heyday in the late 1980s. Among its many reforms is an explicit attempt to foster a unified culture around a ‘spirit of service to the community’—a construct without fixed definition that appears to incorporate ideas of motivations and ethics. This paper shows that this unified culture can be traced through a series of key collaborative discussions that have taken place among New Zealand’s public sector chief executives. The authors present a case study to show how these collaborations contributed to a new social identity, and provided a foundation for a civil service unified by its spirit of service to the community. The paper contributes to this PMM theme by providing empirical evidence from the latest New Zealand experience; and also contributes to theory of social identity and sensemaking in creating civil service values.     

‘Passionate and professional’: reconciling logics in public service accounting

In order to deliver public value, the UK government sought to build relationships and connect ‘the public’ with public servants (including back-office workers), but with what effect? Drawing on interviews with public service accountants, the authors found that how these accountants conceptualized ‘the public’—as society or people—shaped whether public value was considered as a monetary or moral concept. Accountants who regarded the public as people spoke of an improper level of involvement and struggled to maintain their professionalism.     

A new take on voice: the influence of BlackRock’s ‘Dear CEO’ letters

Review of Accounting Studies - Abstract We examine whether broad-based public engagement by institutional investors influences the behavior of portfolio firms. We investigate this question in the...     

New development: Leveraging ‘big data’ analytics in the public sector

This article examines the opportunities presented by effectively harnessing big data in the public sector context. The article is exploratory and reviews both academic- and practitioner–oriented literature related to big data developments. The findings suggest that big data will have an impact on the future role of public sector organizations in functional areas. However, the author also reveals that there are challenges to be addressed by governments in adopting big data applications. To realize the benefits of big data, policy-makers need to: invest in research; create incentives for private and public sector entities to share data; and set up programmes to develop appropriate skills.     

‘We do good things,don’t we?’: ‘Blended Value Accounting’ in social entrepreneurship

This paper presents an exploratory analysis of the emergent reporting practices used by social entrepreneurs in terms of their institutional settings and strategic objectives. These reporting practices not only account for financial performance but also disclose more nuanced and contingent social and environmental impacts and outcomes. Furthermore, they act as symbolic objects expressing the market orientation of many socially entrepreneurial organizations in that they aim to provide more complete and transparent disclosure of a variety of performance impacts. Conceptually, this paper draws upon approaches developed within the sociology of accounting as institutional practice and uses three theoretical interpretations to conceptualize the function and effects of reporting, disclosure, and audit in social entrepreneurship: positivist; critical theorist; and interpretative. A discussion of five case studies leads to the development of a new theoretical construct – ‘Blended Value Accounting’ – that constitutes a spectrum of disclosure logics used by social entrepreneurs to access resources and realize organizational mission objectives with key stakeholders. Conclusions consider some further questions around socially entrepreneurial reporting practices and strategies and suggest some new lines of research going forward.     

It’s who you know that counts: Board connectedness and CSR performance

We examine whether and how board connections affect the firm's corporate social responsibilities (CSR). Grounded in the agency, resource dependence, and social network theory, our research predicts and finds that board connectedness is positively associated with CSR performance. This result is robust to a quasi-natural experiment, alternative measurement specifications, and an instrumental variable approach. Our findings suggest firms that operate in a complex business environment or require more advising (i.e. where demand for information is greater) benefit more from a well-networked board. Also, firms that are poorly governed, have high stock return volatility, low market capitalization, or low institutional ownership tend to benefit more from the well-connected board when the cost of acquiring information is higher. In addition, we show that independent directors’ abilities to gather information and resources from their networks can facilitate the transmission of information. Collectively, our study documents the informational advantage of a network as the predominant channel that allows a well-connected board to improve a firm’s CSR performance.     

Financial structure and economic development: Evidence on the view of ‘new structuralism’

This paper examines the relationship between financial structure and economic development for Germany, the USA, France and Turkey between 1989 and 2012. Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lags (NARDL) is employed to investigate whether a dynamic change exists in the financial structure of these countries in response to a change in their stage of economic development as suggested by the view of ‘new structuralism’. Partly in line with the previous literature, which classified the financial systems of Germany as bank-based, the USA as market-based and France and Turkey as in an intermediate position between these two profiles, the findings presented in this work also give credence to ‘new structuralism’ theory on the linkages between financial structure and the stage of development for these four economies.     

The magic of branding: The role of ‘pledge’, ‘turn’ and ‘prestige’ in fostering consumer trust in financial services

The purpose of this article is to study the impact of brand image on consumer trust through empirical investigation in the context of the financial services sector. While trust helps to bind consumers to brands, a strong brand image works like magic in reducing consumers’ risk perception and promoting trust. This study analyses how brand image influences consumers’ trusting intention through operationalising an interdisciplinary brand-trust model. Constructs and measures were drawn from interdisciplinary brand and trust literature and tested through employing EFA, CFA and structural equation modelling. Data were collected through a quantitative survey of 300 financial services consumers. Using the analogy of a magic trick, the study unveils the key role of financial services branding in engendering consumer trust in the ‘pledge’ or ‘prestige’ parts of the trick but not in the ‘turn’. The research contributes to the convergent and mutually inclusive theories of trust and branding as well as services marketing literature. For managers and policymakers in the financial services sector the findings will help them to effectively manage brand image and foster consumers’ trusting intention.     

Moral leadership and investor attention: An empirical assessment of the potus’s tweets on firms’ market returns

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Drawing upon investor attention and moral leadership theories, we examine the impact of President Trump’s tweets on firms’ market...     

Australia’s ‘two-strikes’ rule and the pay-performance link: Are shareholders judicious?

To improve accountability of executive compensation, Australia introduced the ‘say-on-pay’ legislation in 2011, which is widely known as the ‘two-strikes’ rule. We investigate the consequences of this new rule for the pay-performance link in Australian firms. Employing a matched-pair design, we find that pay changes of the chief executive officer and the key management personnel were not significantly positively related to the stock returns of the firms that registered a ‘first strike’ in 2011 under the ‘two-strikes’ rule. However, the relations improved significantly in 2012. Our results also suggest that the shareholders of the ‘first-strike’ firms may have been over-enthusiastic about their voting power in 2011 but exercised this power more judiciously in 2012. Our findings provide important insights for the global debate on governance of executive compensation.     

‘Agents-in-focus’ and ‘Agents-in-context’: The strong structuration analysis of central government accounting practices and reforms in Nepal

Drawing on Stones’ (2005) strong structuration theory, the paper unfolds why and how the key stakeholders of central government accounting in Nepal are involved in the reproduction of routinised accounting practices, resisting the externally-propagated changes. Government accountants (the agents-in-focus) through their capability to control the budget routines have enjoyed a powerful social position in their position–practice relations with the agents-in-context, i.e. professional accountants and international consultants, higher-level officers and administrators, auditors, and politicians. Social position along with historically-imbued dispositions and their conduct and context analysis have enabled government accountants to strategically exercise their agency. Government accountants have articulated duality and a dialectic relation with the agents-in-context, which have resulted in the reproduction of everyday accounting practice and the resistance to the World Bank-led reforms, such as accrual accounting and, more recently, the Cash-Basis IPSAS.     

New development: Faith,community organizing and migration—the case of ‘regularization’

When civil society organizations pool their muscle, it is amazing what they can achieve. The London Citizens ‘Strangers into Citizens’ campaign has put the idea of a conditional amnesty for illegal immigrants on the political table—and won powerful backers, including the Mayor of London and the Catholic Church.     

Regional Transfer of Haze Pollutants Embodied in China’s Foreign Trade and Factors Affecting It: A GMRIO-Based Empirical Analysis

The paper estimated the balance of emissions embodied in bilateral trade and the pollution terms of trade between China and six major world economies, including USA, Japan, and others, from 1995 to 2009, and then discussed the factors affecting them using the Structural Decomposition Analysis method. We find that, with the exception of Taiwan, the balances of the haze pollutants emissions embodied in bilateral trades were negative between China and the each of the rest five, and this was mainly resulted from the China export scale effect and intermediate input structural effects. We also find that China has become the “Pollution Refuge” for the economies like USA and Japan.     

New development: Spin-outs and social enterprise: the ‘right to request’ programme for health and social care services

The ‘right to request’ policy encouraged and supported National Health Service (NHS) community health staff in England to ‘spin out’ services into independent social enterprises. This article considers the processes and outputs of the initiative and reflects on the likelihood of positive outcomes for patients being achieved. It highlights lessons for future programmes seeking to transfer services out of public ownership.     

New development: China’s debt transparency and the case of urban construction investment bonds

China’s true level of local government debt is unknown. The central government recently introduced policies to increase transparency and close some of the obscure financial instruments. Urban construction investment bonds (UCIBs) are one of the key instruments affected by these changes. Both positive and negative impacts can be expected. The issues the Chinese government is facing and its policy response provide important lessons for other governments.     

New development: What works now? Continuity and change in the use of evidence to improve public policy and service delivery

This article highlights 10 key strands of continuity and change in the use of evidence over the past two decades. Interest in evidence use continues, as do the many challenges encountered when seeking to deliver on this aspiration. There have been developments in ideas and actions, which foster some optimism that better use of varying forms of evidence can be encouraged.     

The ‘perfect storm’ of REACH: charting regulatory controversy in the age of information,sustainable development,and globalization

The European Union's new chemicals regulation, REACH, has been one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in EU history. Indeed, the debate over REACH is akin to a ‘perfect storm’ in that the intense controversy over it has been caused by three regulatory aspects of the regime. First, REACH privatizes information collection, provision and assessment. Second, REACH represents a significant application of sustainable development and in so doing, redefines the conditions on which the EU chemicals market operates. Third, REACH will inevitably have inter‐jurisdictional impacts for both supranational and national legal cultures including trade law implications, REACH being a template for international initiatives, it being a policy/legal irritant in other jurisdictions, and it providing information for public and private action in other jurisdictions. A charting of these different aspects of the regime not only provides a more nuanced account of REACH but also provides a clearer understanding of the challenges of regulating environmental and health risks in an era of market globalization.     

On the ‘Review of Structure and Effectiveness of the IFRS Foundation’: the EAA’s Financial Reporting Standards Committee’s View

In July 2015 the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation launched its third five year review of its structure and effectiveness of the organisation. In a public call, the Trustees solicited stakeholders’ input on the relevance of IFRS Standards with respect to broadening the IFRS scope and to the impact of new technology, on the consistent application of IFRS and on the governance and funding of the International Accounting Standards Board and the IFRS Foundation. The European Accounting Association (EAA)’s Financial Reporting Standards Committee responded to this request for views by submitting a comment letter based on research-informed opinions. This article provides an overview of this Review of Structure and Effectiveness of the IFRS Foundation and the EAA’s opinions in response to this Review.