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Open Access
Accounting and Accountability in the Field of Social Services - A Multi-level Investigation
(2018-03-01) Chawla, Akhila; Neu, Dean
Roberts (1991, p.355) remarked that the analysis of accounting in systems of accountability (also) offers alternative ways to conceive of the transformation of accounting. This dissertation aims to improve multi-level understanding of accounting and accountability within the field of social services. Focusing on Indias Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), one of the worlds largest social services programs, I examine the role of accounting in accountability practices and change processes at macro, meso and micro levels. Current social services literature, straddling public, private and third sectors, reveals accounting-accountability research to be underexplored (Bracci & Llewellyn, 2012) and conspicuously lacking in diversity of research sites, yet undergoing significant change (Ebrahim, 2003; Brinkerhoff & Brinkerhoff, 2004; Llewellyn, 1997; Walz & Ramachandran, 2011). This facilitates a unique set of observations and understandings as program delivery and implementation evolve. This dissertation specifically uses Bourdieus notions of field, habitus and capitals, also linking to literatures on management control systems, budgeting, routines and sense-making. Following the unfolding of MGNREGS over eight years, I raise two main research questions: How are accounting practices and artifacts intentionally enlisted in MGNERGS towards notions of accountability across multiple levels of program governance? What role do accounting practices in MGNREGS play in larger organizational and social change processes? I examine accountings enlistment in an enabling role to frame and diffuse accountability and program structure on a macro level; in a strategical role, to construct accountability at the meso level; and in a learning and sense-making role to implement accountability at the micro level, where the programs accounting and accountability practices intersect with rural villages. My analysis argues that accounting can be mobilized towards emergent change processes both within public organizations and wider social practices to impact the daily lives of underprivileged rural citizens. In MGNREGS, accounting as an organizational and social practice is not only shaped by organizational objectives but also in turn shapes these objectives and the fields material structure, players, powers, logics and habitus. Accounting practices are, thus, an important part of the ordering, (re)organizing and multi-level change processes in the field of social services in India.
Open Access
Accounting, Accountability, and Open Data
(2023-12-08) Walsh, Leigh Ellen; Saxton, Gregory
Widely accepted as central components of good governance, accountability and transparency underpin calls for ‘open’ approaches to organization, including ‘open data’ (OD). But rhetorical use of these catchwords tends to blur important distinctions – and tensions – between them. This dissertation examines the relationships between open data and accountability in democratic governance, specifically as mobilized within public financial management (PFM) systems. The chapters build on one another to answer two overarching questions. First, how does OD combine with and/or extend existing arrangements for public financial management? And second, (how) does OD deliver on its promise to increase accountability? A combination of qualitative research methods including literature review, theory development, and empirical analysis are employed. The theoretical development draws on accountability and transparency literature to propose a framework that situates OD as both an object and instrument of accountability. This framework provides a theoretical lens through which organizational practices can be studied from an accountability perspective and guides the empirical study of OD in local government presented in this dissertation. Empirical materials including documents, interviews, and observations were gathered following a case study method and analysed to offer two distinct yet complementary views of OD in PFM. First, by adopting a data ‘producer’ perspective and theorizing OD as an informing practice, the study finds that OD has been adopted as a new type of informing practice and constitutes an aspect of conduct for which organizational actors are accountable. Two transparency orientations – usability and understandability – are identified and used to explain tensions and/or barriers that arise in OD implementation. Second, data ‘user’ perspectives are considered by theorizing OD as an instrument of accountability used in debating processes. The findings suggest that while there is a clear alignment between ‘open’ and ‘dialogic’ principles, OD is at best considered a partial tool that, used dialogically and in combination with other information sources, may encourage dialogic forms of engagement and accountability. Drawing attention to the absence of accounting in the burgeoning field of ‘open’ practice and research, this dissertation encourages Further research at the intersection of accounting, accountability, and open data.
Open Access
Debt, Neoliberalism, and Accounting
(2020-08-11) Gilbert, Christine; Everett, Jeffery S.
The present doctoral thesis aims to explore the roles and limitations of accounting, in the broadest sense and including auditing, in financialized neoliberalism where indebtedness, through personal and public debt, has become central to governing the population. To achieve this objective, this research explores these two levels of debt, namely personal and public, and addresses the following research question: What are the roles of accounting and its impacts on the phenomenon of debt as a disciplinary and control device? This work begins with Chapter II, which examines one way of constructing indebted subjects and illustrates that, at the individual level, vague and imprecise accounting processes can play a determining role in disciplining them to become financially responsible and financialized subjects, through the generation of emotions such as fear, shame, and anxiety. Subsequently, Chapter III shows the construction of a discourse advocating the absolute priority of debt repayment (over the needs of the population), and demonstrates how organic intellectuals who want to resist this dictate are trying to organize themselves to defuse it. This study reveals that accounting can make their task more difficult given its complexity, especially in regards to debating public debt in the public space. The paper invites organic intellectuals to get out of the accounting complexity trap, either by drawing on the common sense as highlighted by Sikka (2000), or by translating accounting concepts into other fields, such as in the environment, in order to also get in touch with the population on an emotional level rather than just a rational level. This thesis ends on a more positive note in Chapter IV, which examines a case where accounting, and more specifically auditing, helped a small Third World country to reverse the power dynamic with international holders of financial capital. The audit, which was mobilized in the Ecuadorian governments strategy to renegotiate its public debt at its advantage, offered an alternative narrative to create an accountability relationship that did not previously exist, contributed to creating a sense of fear among investors, and provided legitimacy in the eyes of some stakeholders regarding the renegotiation of the countrys debt.
Open Access
Materializing Performance: The Interactions that Enact Inclusions, Exclusions and Arrangements in Charity Social Performance Reports
(2018-03-01) Ruff, Katherine Young; Neu, Dean
The accounting concept materiality is theorized then elaborated in two empirical studies. Materiality is theorized as a performative enactment of entangled objects and idealities that in turn influences which objects and idealities come to matter. Theorized in this way, materiality is not understood as judgements of human preparers and auditors, but a material-discursive practice interacting with agentive objects (such as templates and information technologies) and idealities (including professional norms). Inscriptions in accounting systems and public-facing reports are the traces of these interactions, which collectively constitute a text that is itself an entanglement of matter and meaning, and that itself enacts an ongoing becoming of what matters. The theorization of materiality is elaborated in the context of charity reporting on social (mission-related) performance. Materiality in charity reporting is a pressing question in its own right, and a useful context in which to bring visibility to materiality concepts that are taken-for-given in financial accounting contexts. The first study elaborates how things come to matter, and not matter, examining social performance reporting in charity annual accounts from 1865 to 2014. It focuses on the interactions of templates, expertise and printing technology in the inclusions, exclusions and arrangements of performance information in charity annual reports. The second study interrogates the differences in materiality by comparing six reports, each based on the same performance measures from a real charity. It focuses on the interactions of templates and prior inscriptions in the differential materializations. A final essay develops policy recommendations in light of the new theorization of materiality by reconsidering the idea of the reasonable investor and elaborating the concept of the reasonable donor.

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