Special issue on public sector accounting and accountability in an era of austerity: new directions, challenges and deficits

Special issue on public sector accounting and accountability in an era of austerity: new directions, challenges and deficits

Article Type: Call for papers From: Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Volume 27, Issue 3

Guest Editors:

Enrico Bracci, University of Ferrara, Italy

Chris Humphrey, Manchester Business School, UK

Jodie Moll, Manchester Business School, UK

Ileana Steccolini, Bocconi University, Italy

The current state of public finances and the era of austerity that has followed the outbreak of the global financial crisis are posing unprecedented challenges for governments and public services. Governments are under pressure to cut public expenditure, deliver balanced budgets, as well as to meet an increasingly sophisticated and heterogeneous demand for public services while playing a role in the economic recovery and growth.

Public sector accounting and accountability systems are seriously implicated in such processes. On the one hand, they are used to shape, and justify, or, alternatively, to counter and resist, discourses and measures of austerity. They also serve to challenge or reinforce and sustain particular representations, assumptions and myths of the value of particular accounting practices and forms of accountability. There are calls for greater transparency on the overall state of public finances, together with the need for a more significant and visible role for public sector accountants and finance officers, and the pursuit of more participatory decision-making processes.

In addressing such challenges, it is not only traditional budgeting, measurement and reporting systems that may have inadequacies - but also our own explanations and theorizations. Both practice and its conceptualizations may all require a profound rethinking. This special issue specifically seeks to invite empirical and theoretical contributions from a wide variety of research perspectives and approaches. Possible avenues of investigation might include approaches addressing, inter alia, the following questions:

• In what ways are accounting and austerity being connected? In what ways is accounting shaping impressions, attitudes and behaviors towards austerity and that status/standing of governments and public service organizations?

• How is austerity accounted for, explained, contrasted and accepted through the language and practice of accounting?

• How are the roles and practices of accounting changing in the face of austerity? How is the era of austerity shaping the claims made for, and usages of, accounting systems in governmental and public service organizations?

• Are public sector accounting rationalities and practices shifting acknowledged notions and forms of governmental accountability and control? What are the shifting connections between and interpretations of the relationship between accounting and the public interest?

• Are accounting systems being used as vehicles for cost-cutting and/or as engines for growth? Are certain accounting systems and approaches proving more influential and significant than others?

• In what ways are accountants' identities and roles being reconfigured by the context of austerity and the accounting technologies being promoted in response?

• How do inter-organizational and inter-governmental bodies and associated relations engender new systems of accounting and accountability?

• And overall, what further new directions and challenges await public sector accounting and accountability systems and those promoting, using, relying on and fighting against them in the on-going and/or post-austerity era?

Key dates

Paper submissions should be made via Scholar One: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aaaj

Please read the journal guidelines before submitting: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/aaaj.htm

All papers should be received by 31 March 2014.

Contact details

For inquiries and further information please contact: Ileana Steccolini, E-mail:mailto:ileana.steccolini@sdabocconi.it or Enrico Bracci, E-mail: mailto:enrico.bracci@unife.it