The vast literature on accountability in the public sector (usually called ‘public accountability’originating from political science and public administration tends to emphasize the positive dimension of holding authorities to account. As formulated by one prominent scholar in the field, ‘[a]ccountability has become an icon for good governance’: it is perceived as ‘a Good Thing, and, so it seems, we can’t have enough of it’ (Bovens, 2005: 182, 183). Accountability has, thus, become one of the central values of democratic rule – varying on a well-known American slogan one could phrase this as ‘no public responsi bility without accountability’.
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This paper investigates how management accounting and control systems (operationalized by using Simons’ (1995a) levers of control framework) can be used as devices to support public value creation and as such it contributes to the literature on public value accounting. Using a mixed methods case study approach, including documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews, we found diverging uses of control systems in the Dutch university of applied sciences we investigated. While belief and interactive control systems are used intensively for strategy change and implementation, diagnostic controls were used mainly at the decentral level and seen as devices to make sure that operational and financial boundaries were not crossed. Therefore, belief and interactive control systems lay the foundation for the implementation of a new strategy, in which concepts of public value play a large role, using diagnostic controls to constrain actions at the operational level. We also found that whereas the institution wanted to have interaction with the external stakeholders, in daily practice this takes place only at the phase of strategy formulation, but not in the phase of intermediate strategy evaluation.
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A B S T R A C T Background: Approximately 4 years ago a new concept of learning in practice called the ‘Learning and Innovation Network (LIN)’ was introduced in The Netherlands. To develop a definition of the LIN, to identify working elements of the LIN in order to provide a preliminary framework for evaluation, a concept analysis was conducted. Method: For the concept analysis, we adopted the method of Walker and Avant. We searched for relevant publications in the EBSCO host portal, grey literature and snowball searches, as well as Google internet searches and dictionary consults. Results: Compared to other forms of workplace learning, the LIN is in the centre of the research, education and practice triangle. The most important attributes of the LIN are social learning, innovation, daily practice, reflection and co-production. Often described antecedents are societal developments, such as increasing complexity of work, and time and space to learn. Frequently identified consequences are an attractive workplace, advancements of expertise of care professionals, innovations that endorse daily practice, improvement of quality of care and the integration of education and practice. Conclusions: Based on the results of the concept analysis, we describe the LIN as ‘a group of care professionals, students and an education representatives who come together in clinical practice and are all part of a learning and innovation community in nursing. They work together on practice-based projects in which they combine best practices, research evidence and client perspectives in order to innovate and improve quality of care and in which an integration of education, research and practice takes place’. We transferred the outcomes of the concept analysis to an input-throughput-output model that can be used as a preliminary framework for future research.
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