Public sector accounting and accountability scholarship has witnessed huge developments in the last three decades, paralleling the dramatic changes undergone by the public sector worldwide. Appreciating the width and breadth of the impacts of public sector reforms is not an easy task. Yet, there is no doubt that Irvine Lapsley’s work is a fundamental reading for anybody interested in understanding how accounting and accountability systems were mobilized and involved in public sector reforms, whether, how and why they fell short of expectations, and what would be needed to overcome their shortcomings.
Irvine has been among the first to understand the enormous potential of looking at the ways in which the public sector context shapes accounting, and, in turn, how accounting shapes the public context where it operates. He has also incessantly encouraged and nurtured new generations of scholars to continue exploring and understanding the never-ending succession of public sector reforms, and to highlight what was working, but also what was not working in them. Central to his preoccupation is the relationship between the technical and the “human” dimension of reforms, and an exploration of the unrelenting nature of NPM reforms. In his work, he reminds us to avoid an excessive, acritical confidence in the neutral “perfection” of technologies (be they digital, accounting, or others), as any technical development will always need to take into consideration the social and human implications and dimensions to be successful.
This virtual issue contains (only) a small selection among the multiple papers produced by Irvine. Irvine’s work spans papers published in a plurality of journals, edited books and special issues. Yet, in this virtual issue we focus on the papers he published in FAM, the journal that, under his editorship, has become the international fundamental forum for scholars to debate, discuss and advance public sector accounting and accountability issues.
The first paper of the virtual issue, Lapsley (1999) introduces one of the first special issues that will look at the interconnections between NPM and accounting, being among the first to point at the inherent contradictions and initial shortcomings emerging in reforms, suggesting an increasing role for accounting as rationalizing and modernising practice. This initial intuition will find further development in Lapsley’s (2008) “back to the future” reflection. This represents a central reference for public sector accounting scholars. Here, the recognition that reforms in the public sector produce unexpected and unwanted effects is accompanied by an exploration of the ‘déjà vu’ effect in NPM reforms, i.e., their “recurring” nature. This translates into eight propositions, which 14 years ago, anticipated most of the subsequent developments we have witnessed in public management and accounting, from the continuous ‘collision’ of professional and managerial values, to the excessive burden placed on managers and their attempts at making actions more and more auditable, through the continued focus on performance measurement and financial incentives systems, and the persistence of dysfunctional effects of such systems, to the imperviousness of the public sector to actual, durable changes.
The centrality (and criticality) of performance management systems is also at the core of Arnaboldi et al (2015), which points to the multiple ways in which they have failed in public sector reforms, falling short of expectations. In doing so, the paper points at the need, for such systems to work, to take into better consideration the high complexity of public sector, paying more attention, for example, the roles of humans, agents, and managers in complex, instable, adaptive systems, and the role of social media and plural perspectives in shaping different views of public services. More generally, the paper provides a plurality of new perspectives to be embraced, inviting scholars to undertake more nuanced research in this area.
Hodges and Lapsley (2016) explore another case of failure, that of the response of the British Government to the global financial crisis. Interestingly, they show how the Government responded first with hope and then with bricolage to the crisis, heavily relying on financial conservatism and austerity measures, without any evidence that these responses were successful in facing the crisis. More generally, this contribution suggests that too often governments rely on one-fits-all responses at moment of crisis, because they are the “available” responses, thought not necessarily effective. This appears to be a common feature of many NPM reforms, which paradoxically, instead of stopping their introduction, appears to end up encouraging further engagement with new, additional reforms, drawing on the same, old NPM arsenal.
Along similar lines, Hyndman and Lapsley (2016) confirm that this state of things, and the continuous adoption of new reforms, the emergence of e-government and of public governance arrangements in the public sector, are not exempting the public sector from being still affected and impacted upon by NPM ideas. In their view, we thus still live in a profoundly NPM-dominated world, at least in the UK.
Nyland et al (2021) provide reasons for hope in a different world, where reactions and resistance to NPM happen. In particular, in their Norwegian study, they show how NPM was rejected by politicians, who did not accept and rather challenged NPM-like developments. In this case, politicians tactically used accounting information to successfully challenge neoliberal thinking underpinning NPM. In doing so, this study shows that accounting can not only be used to bring forward and promote PM-like ideals, but also to resist them, and, more generally, to bring forward alternative views and ideas. This contrasts nicely with more pessimistic perspectives, and shapes new hopes for the roles of accounting in the public sector, suggesting new, important areas of research deserving new attention.
The papers selected for this virtual issue, in witnessing a long and exciting academic journey by an extraordinary scholar, all share a very strong preoccupation about the limits of accounting technologies when they are changed according to some rational, neutral, ideal, rather than considering the human and social implications and dimensions. All those papers remind us that reforms are made of a plurality of “ingredients”, and it is on their combination and blending, through human judgements, actions and interactions, and complex, unique, idiosyncratic processes, difficult to control and predict, that the final consequences will stem/emerge. They also remind us that reform and change are continuous, never-ending processes, in continuous flux, which requires continue maintenance, intervention, re-consideration, and critical scholarship attention.
Other Irvine Lapsley’s Publications in FAM:
- ‘Investment Appraisal in the National Health Service’ (with K.Ferguson), Financial Accountability and Management, Winter, 1988, 281-290.
- ‘Costing Needs and Practices in a Changing Environment: The Potential for ABC in the NHS’, (with M.King, F.Mitchell & J.Moyes), Financial Accountability and Management, May, 1994, 143-160.
- 'Meeting the Challenge: Accounting for Change', (with A. Pettigrew), Financial Accountability and Management, May, 1994, 79-92.
- 'Decentralisation in Central Government: Recycling Old Ideas?', (with M.Bromwich), Financial Accountability and Management, Vol 13, No 2, May 1997, 195-208.
- 'Accounting, Modernity and Healthcare Policy', Financial Accountability and Management, Vol 17, No 4, 2001, 331-350.
- Conflict and Rationality: Accounting in Northern Ireland’s Devolved Assembly, (with Ezzamel M., N. Hyndman, Å. Johnsen, I. Lapsley and J. Pallot), Financial Accountability and Management, 21(1), 2005, 33-55.
