Placing the Normative Logics of Accountability in Thick Perspective

This paper provides a critical reflection on the heavily normative nature of current accountability debates. In particular, three streams of normative discourse on nonprofit accountability are identified: improving board governance; improving performance-based reporting; and, demonstrating progress towards mission. A focus on these normative logics, while important, can mask the realities of social structure and the relations of power that underlie them. The paper thus proposes a more empirical approach to framing accountability problems thick description and interpretation that might enable us better to understand how social regimes of accountability actually operate and in which the instruments of accountability are at least as likely to reproduce relationships of inequality as they are to overturn them.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 33.2. Hauser Working Paper Series Nos. 33.1-33.9 were prepared as background papers for the Nonprofit Governance and Accountability Symposium October 3-4, 2006

Call for Participatory Decision Making: Discussion Paper on World Bank-Civil Society Engagement

This paper explores the opportunities for more meaningful, empowering forms of participation in World Bank decision-making. First, it examines the challenges of improving public participation in the Bank's institutional governance, and in its operations at global, national, and local levels. Then, it proposes a set of principles and a framework for thinking about how to expand and deepen the opportunities for meaningful public participation in all stages of Bank decisionmaking. Finally, it uses the framework to propose a set of recommendations for improving Bank practice for consideration by the World Bank's management and Board

Accountability in Complex Organizations: World Bank Responses to Civil Society

Civil society actors have been pushing for greater accountability of the World Bank for at least three decades. This paper outlines the range of accountability mechanisms currently in place at the World Bank along four basic levels: (1) staff, (2) project, (3) policy, and (4) board governance. We argue that civil society organizations have been influential in pushing for greater accountability at the project and policy levels, particularly through the establishment and enforcement of social and environmental safeguards and complaint and response mechanisms. But they have been much less successful in changing staff incentives for accountability to affected communities, or in improving board accountability through greater transparency in decision making, more representative vote allocation, or better parliamentary scrutiny. In other words, although civil society efforts have led to some gains in accountability with respect to Bank policies and projects, the deeper structural features of the institution - the incentives staff face and how the institution is governed- remain largely unchanged.

Digital data and management accounting: why we need to rethink research methods

Digitalisation is having profound effects on how enterprises function. Its impact on accounting research is growing as the rise of the internet, mobile technologies and digital economy tools generate depth, breadth and variety of data that far exceed what researchers have had access to in the past. But whilst social scientists interested in organisational issues are starting to question conventional methodological approaches to the study of contexts where digital data forms are drawn upon, little such concern has been voiced in the management accounting literature. This paper seeks to explore the continued applicability of conventional methodological thinking when carrying out investigations within digital data environments to inform management accounting studies. It considers why digitalisation impacts methodological precepts, identifies how descriptive and explanatory modes of questioning which management accountants have conventionally opted for need rethinking, discusses ways in which digital data characteristics alter what can be drawn from empirical studies, and points to the potential offered within digitalised settings for methodological advance. It concludes by highlighting the necessity, where digitalisation exists, to question modes of posing questions and to reconsider the applicability of methodological precepts deployed by management accounting researchers to date

Period-tracking apps: how femtech creates value for users and platforms

Many cultures see menstruation as a taboo, but technology is thought by many to provide a solution, writes Alnoor Bhiman

Is accounting keeping pace with digitalization?

Digital transformations are taking place across enterprises in every industry. Becoming digital is both essential to compete and virtually unstoppable. All previous major technological disruptions have led to financial intelligence being altered to ensure more effective decision making in the face of change. This article considers issues that organizations going digital need to address in relation to accounting information provision. It discusses several points: accounting’s need to move toward the delivery of predictive information rather than relying on extrapolations of historical data; the recognition that machines make more decisions that alter accounting information needs, structures, and contents; the importance of recognizing the “data-learning-action” loop that is emerging; the emergence of “strat-perational” information contexts; and the relevance of prioritizing qualitative insights in decision making

As businesses go digital, accounting takes on a new meaning

Traditionally, accounting systems have focused on the rear-view mirror, capturing information about economic transactions that have occurred. Now, however, digital data can point to future economic exchanges. Al Bhimani writes that, if accountants are to retain their usefulness, rather than recording retrospective insights, they must report on predictive insights based on data analysis that is much wider than what accounting information systems have been set up to do

Tech start-ups need a different approach to financial management

We find ourselves today at the start of an industrial revolution. There have been others of course. The first revolution happened 250 years ago. Its engine was mechanisation. Another, about a hundred years ago, was all about electrification and mass production. Then 50 years ago, electronics and automation started a third revolution

Conflict and compassion: a paradox of difference in contemporary Asian art

Conflict is avoidable. However, this is often recognized only in retrospect and sometimes because of the high cost of conflict. Many situations of conflict in Asia – past and present − seem to consist of opposed groups for whom conflict has become an unavoidable obsession. This book is part of the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014 symposium, which was held at the Imperial War Museum North on 20 November 2014. The authors discuss the arts and contemporary artists who produce works that entail both innovation and allusion to conflict in the pan-Asian world. The essays in this book demonstrate how conflict and compassion are ‘in’ these works – in markedly different (even antagonistic) ways: the forms and the contents are bound up together, often in specific works that themselves contain antagonisms of identity, identification, difference and meaning