Accountability is a cherished concept, sought after but elusive. New models of administrative reform promise to provide heightened accountability through managerial controls. Interviews with 15 Chief Executives of Australian public sector organisations reveal the chameleon quality of accountability. Accountability is subjectively constructed and changes with context Five forms of accountability identified in the interviews are explored: political, public, managerial, professional and personal Two discourses of accountability are also identified: a structural and a personal discourse. CEOs experience an accountability which encompasses multiple and conflicting meanings. The paper argues for a new conception of accountability and new approaches to enhancing it. Imposing managerial controls is less likely to be effective than informing the process by which administrators construct and enact a sense of being accountable.

The chameleon of accountability: Forms and discourses

Despite the fact that gouernment in the United States relies more heavily on nonprofit organizations than on its own instrumentalities to deliver government- funded human services, and that nonprof...

Of Market Failure, Voluntary Failure, and Third-Party Government: Toward a Theory of Government-Nonprofit Relations in the Modern Welfare State

Public accountability: a new paradigm for college and university annual reports

The methodology used to craft a disclosure index with parametric statistical properties is described and explained. The index is developed from a public accountability perspective using stakeholder opinions captured via a delphi exercise. Named the Public Accountability Index (PAI), the index is applied to the annual reports of the New Zealand universities, 1985–2000. This was a period of radical change for the public sector, and the index scores reflect the wholesale changes in reporting over the period. PAI is offered as a generic stakeholder approach for the development of disclosure indices to measure annual reports of groups of organisations in any of the private, public or so-called third sectors.

The public accountability index: crafting a parametric disclosure index for annual reports

The recent surge in popularity of ‘accountability’ in public administration and international development seems in part divorced from centuries of conceptual and empirical work done in related disc

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0020852313477761

Bruce L. R. Smith

Papers

The Dilemma of Accountability in Modern Government

The dilemma of accountability in modern government: Independence versus control;