To Örebro University

Purpose: This paper follows how a Swedish municipality builds their management control infrastructure over 25 years – from the early 1990s to the middle of the 2010s; complemented by a revisit in 2023. The analysis builds on Power’s (2015) framework on “how accounting begins.” As such, it will show the process in which objects such as quality, competence, fairness and economy (1) start their journey as abstract policy objects – promises or dreams, but also as problems – that should be achieved by the municipal organization; (2) begin to take on more concrete forms as they become elaborated, activities are orchestrated and an increasingly stable infrastructure is built around them and (3) achieve multiplicity in ways that make the daily work of practitioners highly complex, leading them to engage in strategizing. This makes accounting continue: once this long and arduous process is worked through, when the infrastructure has stabilized, and the strategizing behavior is learned, this three-step process moves much faster.

Design/methodology/approach: This study is a longitudinal case study over 25 years in one municipal organization: the city of Stockholm – capital of Sweden. We begin in 1991, which is the approximate start of a shift in Stockholm from an old public administration model (Hood, 1991) toward NPM, and we end in 2016, with a post script 2023, when this shift has proceeded into something slightly new and different. Our research engagement with the city of Stockholm has been long-standing: since the early 1990s, we have been conducting five larger research projects on different aspects of management control (for example, the introduction of competition or the decentralization reform) and we have had continuous exchange with city officials and co-workers through workshops and participative observations. For the purpose of this study, we focus on the data from the five research projects and the reading of all budget documents and annual reports from 1991 to 2016.

Findings: The findings extend the framework by Power (2015) in a way that helps us understand how accounting continues. Accounting continues for three interrelated reasons: (1) because of the foundational work that is done over a long time, and according to Power’s (2015) model, where objects such as quality, competence and economy go from existing in abstract programmatic forms to more concrete technological ones around which activities can be orchestrated and where exercises involving learning and collaboration are key. (2) Because such learning and collaboration allow practitioners – professionals and accountants – to engage in strategizing the system in different ways that make it functional. Such strategizing can be argued to be part of the broader infrastructure – not only the “highways” but also the shortcuts and scenic detours are part of it. (3) Because such strategizing makes top managers and politicians think that the system works in rather unproblematic ways – they never see the struggles that go on “the lower levels” of organization. The argument of this paper is that the focus on the outside world and the interest to extend the system by incorporating more and more objects in programmatic forms that we see on the political level in the third period is a sign of further diffusion by accounting: because the system seems to work so well, it can be extended to new parts of the world. And this is how accounting continues.

Research limitations/implications: From the empirical data, we have derived three periods, which can be seen as three phases of building the infrastructure. We see these periods as struggles to gain knowledge about what the organization should provide and an ongoing engagement to build an infrastructure that would support the delivery of the identified objects quality, economy, fairness and competence. These periods could, of course, be divided in different ways. However, as we interpreted the patterns in our data, this dividing of the data seemed reasonable.

Practical implications: In the first chapter of their book, Lapsley and Miller (2024, p. 4) provide a quote from 1983 by an NPM proponent. This proponent depicted the old public administration model, which institutions like, e.g. the NHS, were built upon, as “‘a mobile’: designed to move with every breath of air, but which infact never changes its position and gives no clear indication of direction.” Exactly the same thing can be said about the NPM-related infrastructure we have analyzed. Funck and Karlsson (2023) are obviously right when they argue that proponents of post-NPM movements echo the concerns of NPM proponents “back in the days.” We add to this by arguing that NPM has become what it was supposed to replace: a directionless mobile, maintaining status quo while allowing for strategic behavior (Caffrey et al., 2019). What we learn from NPM’s early days is that no “radical rethinking” (Parker et al., 2023) or “imaginaries” (Funck and Karlsson, 2023) can change this: what is needed, for a real paradigm shift, is the introduction of new problems and new experimentation on the practical level. What remains, both from a practical and academic point of view, would be to discuss what constitutes “enough experimentation”? What can be introduced today that is as disruptive as the introduction of, e.g. tender documents, purchaser/provider models, profit units, etc. during the implementation of NPM? These questions might have to be answered – otherwise accounting will continue to perform as is.

Originality/value: We believe a relevant contribution with the paper is the longitudinal character of the method.

It is well known that both management and professional work in areas such as health and aged care rely upon division of individuals into categories of, for example, diagnoses or costs and revenues. The present paper turns this around and asks: what happens if individuality, the indivisible wholeness of the person, is taken seriously in such practices? If every human being is interpreted as unique and special, and their wholeness is recognised in the relationship between professionals and an individual receiving care? The paper analyses two rival programmes - those of efficiency and individuality - and their operationalisation in Swedish aged care, and show how these programmes and corresponding technologies are sources of dissension that can be used to problematise how care should be conducted. However, such dissension also opens up spaces of freedom, which allow care practitioners to conduct care differently.

In this study, we follow how valuation practices evolve over a 25 years period in one single municipal Swedish organisation: The City of Stockholm. By delving into the performativity of accounting instruments, i.e. how accounting becomes part of making up the world we live in, the present study aims at extending the understanding we regarding that accountingization of the public sector rests on external pressures to adopt accounting, and the activity of organisational actors. Guided by a sociomaterial approach, the study shows how the making of conditions for valuation is hard work and fraught with contradictions. For accountingization to “succeed” in such an environment, a series of preparations have to be done that establishes the conditions for accounting to work. These preparatory arrangements are examined, and it is suggested that they are integral for accounting to become dominant in determining what is valuable and not.

The study does not end here, however. Instead, it continues the analysis further, and examines what happens “after” accountingization is “done”. By doing this, it is shown that not only does accounting need certain conditions to work – to be successful in dominating valuation practices and determining what is valuable; accounting, itself, also comes to form conditions for valuation in practice, and in doing so it becomes problematic and therefor needs to be strategically managed. It is argued that this is a process that needs to be further analysed as a performative spiral. This spiral entails the emergence of conditions that allows constitutive elements, such as accounting, to define what is valuable and what is not, constituting both valuability and non-valuability. Through this participation in the constitution of “thingness” – i.e. which things that matter in particular systems of valuation – and “otherness” – i.e. which things that do not matter in particular systems of valuation – accounting participates in multiplying value. Because when things are othered, that is, excluded from a specific valuation practice, it becomes the problem of other practices; and when things that are defined as valuable in one valuation practice begins to matter in other valuation practices, this particular, intruding, version of the valuable becomes problematic for that practice. The main contribution by this paper is to show how accounting, in becoming conditions for valuation, also participates in the multiplying of value.

Budgeting has endured changes in management ideals, because it supports an instrumental rationality in which organizations should use their own resources to produce their own results. Budgeting depends on and enforces traditional and transactional systems based on predefined entities, such as single-purpose organizations and measurable outputs. This study investigates this issue and asks what types of entities budgeting needs, and where and when these entities can be negotiated and reconstructed. This study shows that budgeting and its reinforcement of traditional and transactional systems makes it difficult to proceed towards new management ideals based on cooperation, sharing, and responsiveness.

This paper suggests the study of professionalism and the professionalising processes within public sector organisations. Sociologists propose that professionalism is changing into a new variant developing under the premise of organisational management and control. This paper disputes the perspective that the use of management control leads to deprofessionalisation in terms of the routinisation of reflective professional tasks or weakened professional values. This paper proposes that, with client focus, professionals and accountants can cooperate and create coherence between management control system elements and professional values. This dynamic contributes to the retention of professional values and more reflective work procedures.

In this chapter, the development of financial sustainability and resilience in Swedish local governments is analysed. We analyse four Swedish municipalities, where we have interviewed top managers and co-workers. As a complement, we have examined the municipalities’ strategic plans, budget documents and annual reports. We also contextualise this analysis with other findings from local government research during this time, as well as with central government initiatives. In summary, we examine why Swedish municipalities in general remained strong after the financial crisis by showing how they strengthened their anticipatory and coping capacities over time – something that, in the cases of this chapter, was achieved before the 2008/2009 crisis in response to previous crises, rather than because of it. We also show that this is not the only reason. As Swedish finances were comparatively stable, and the problems of the banking sector relatively small, the financial shocks to the municipalities could be overcome relatively easily.

Denna rapport har som mål att studera hur Trafikverket praktiserar strategi tillsammans med andra intressenter och aktörer. Rapporten utgör delprojekt 3 i ett större treårigt projekt som genomförts inom Akademin för ekonomistyrning i staten (AES) vid Företagsekonomiska institutionen, Stockholms universitet. Projektet har finansierats av Trafikverket, inom ramen för FoI-portfölj nummer sex, Trafikverket – en modern myndighet. Tidigare delrapporter inom projektet har visat att det internt i organisationen finns flera bilder av hur strategin ska omsättas i praktiken, samt diskuterat vad som är viktigt i detta arbete. Då en stor del av Trafikverkets uppdrag genomförs av externa parter ingår det också i forskningsprojektet att studera vad som händer med Trafikverkets strategiska arbete i externa relationer. När flera organisationers strategier möts, påverkar och påverkas av varandra väcks frågor om hur strategier samverkar och hur sådan strategisk samverkan fungerar i praktiken. Målet med denna rapport är därför att utveckla kunskap om strategisk verksamhetsstyrning genom att koppla samman frågor om strategi med frågor om samverkan. Detta uppnås genom att studera hur samverkan fungerar i praktiken. Som grund för rapporten har tre olika exempel på praktiker studerats där Trafikverket möter andra aktörer i planering och genomförande av Trafikverkets arbete.

För att utveckla förståelsen av samverkan antar studien ett samverkansperspektiv: studien tar utgångspunkt i praktiken, snarare än i de samverkande aktörerna. Till skillnad från tidigare samverkansstudiers fokus på enskilda organisationers nytta av att samverka, innebär detta samverkansperspektiv fördjupade frågor om hur olika aktörer med olika intressen verkar samman, och hur sådan samverkan fungerar i praktiken. För att kunna diskutera samverkan på ett konstruktivt sätt används tre teoretiska begrepp i rapporten: mångfald, intressering och löften. Med dessa begrepp som utgångspunkt inriktas analysen på att undersöka förutsättningar för samverkan. Utifrån analysen av samverkans förutsättningar presenteras i rapportens avslutande kapitel ett utvecklat förhållningssätt till samverkan: intresserande samverkan. 

This article explores the next phase of public management: the era of paradox. As new public management (NPM) policies and practices were shown to be inadequate to solve the problems of public management, they began to be complemented – rather than replaced – with new reforms and practices. These reforms and practices are often contradictory to existing ones, leaving managers in a difficult position. By extending the debate about contradictions and paradox from the policy level to the organisational level, we show how public sector managers work to resolve these contradictions in a situated manner, keeping the contradictions alive rather than resolving them permanently.