Political and organizational legitimacy of public sector auditing in New Zealand local government

Abstract

This article expands our understanding of the introduction of new audit arrangements in the public sector by looking at two cases relating to the audit of local government using the dual lens of political legitimacy and organizational legitimacy. The first case saw the Audit Office replace the elected auditors as the sole auditor of municipalities in 1886 and the second case saw the Auditor-General fail to gain additional powers to control the financial management of local government in 1892. Following Power (2003), the article illustrates how legitimacy was sought in these cases using the three stages of controversy, closure and credibility. The nature of the legitimacy is viewed as organizational (Suchman, 1995) or political (Levi et al., 2009). The use of the dual lens provides a deeper understanding of the form of the legitimacy and how it was obtained within the setting of local government.

Welfare or politics? The identity of Italian mutual aid societies as revealed by a latent class cluster analysis of their annual reports

“…With regard to the link between accounting and political issues, the current research directions are varied. Some authors have focused on how accounting practices support political power (Jones, 2010; Sargiacomo, 2008; Spence, 2010) and political decisions (Lai et al, 2012); others have explored how accounting systems have changed under the influence of various political ideologies (Ji and Lu, 2013; Rodrigues et al, 2011; Xu et al, 2014) and political shifts (Baker and Rennie, 2012, 2013; Bracci et al, 2010), or the way in which accounting practices have become essential weapons in political struggles (Baños et al, 2013) and the struggle for political legitimacy (Colquhoun, 2013).…”

Exploring past, present and future trends in public sector auditing research: a literature review

“…institutional theory and legitimacy theory) and sometimes from different groups (e.g. agency theory with stakeholder and resource dependence theory) (Christopher and Sarens, 2018;Colquhoun, 2013;Goddard and Malagila, 2015;Justesen and Skaerbaek, 2010;Lino and de Aquino, 2018;Stephenson, 2017).…”

Multilevel Influence of Routine Redesigning, Legitimacy and Functional Affordance on Sustainability Accounting: Mediating Role of Organizational Sense-making

“…The first one, pragmatic legitimacy, is offered based on the audience benefit. The second one, moral legitimacy, is offered when an organization operates based on community moral interests and concerns and not on personal interests, while the third one, cognitive legitimacy, is offered to an organization when it works based on values and beliefs of stakeholders, in addition to its acceptability among audience (Colquhoun, 2013).…”