The translation and sedimentation of accounting reforms. A comparison of the UK, Austrian and Italian experiences

Abstract

The translation and sedimentation of accounting reforms. A comparison of the UK, Austrian and Italian experiences AbstractSince the late 1980s, there has been a significant and progressive movement away from the traditional Public Administration (PA) systems, in favour of NPM-type accounting tools and ideas inspired by the private sector. More recently, a new focus on governance systems, under the banner Public Governance (PG), has emerged. In this paper it is argued that reforms are not isolated events, but are embedded in more global discourses of modernisation and influenced by the institutional pressures present in a certain field at certain points in time. Using extensive document analysis in three countries with different administrative regimes (the UK, Italy and Austria), we examine public sector accounting and budgeting reforms and the underlying discourses put forward in order to support the change. We investigate the extent to which the actual content of the reforms and the discourses they are embedded within are connected over time; that is, whether, and to what degree, the reform "talk" matches the "decisions". The research shows that in both the UK and in Italy there is consistency between the debates and the decided changes, although the dominant discourse in each country differs, while in Austria changes are decided gradually, and only after they have been announced well in advance in the political debate. We find that in all three countries the new ideas and concepts layer and sediment above the existing ones, rather than replace them. Although all three countries underwent similar accounting and budgeting reforms and relied on similar institutional discourses, each made its own specific translation of the ideas and concepts and is characterized by a specific formation of sedimentations. In addition, the findings suggest that, at present in the three countries, the PG discourse is used to supplement, rather than supplant, other prevailing discourses.

Studying administrative reforms through textual analysis: the case of Italian central government accounting

“…In particular, we take into consideration the complexity Hyndman et al 2014). PA, NPM and GOV can be fruitfully captured through the use of textual analysis.…”

“…The contributions discussing NPM and GOV describe their main characteristics (Marsh and Rhodes 1992;Ferlie et al 1996;Pollit and Bouckaert 2004;Peters 2008) and identify (theoretically and empirically) their positive and negative effects (Dunleavy and Hood 1994;Lapsley 2008Lapsley , 2009Hood and Peters 2004), thus focusing on the contents of reforms, on their implementation, and the gaps therein. With some recent exceptions (Fattore et al 2012;Hyndman et al 2014), less attention has been given to how reforms ideas and values are made sense of and discussed by those responsible for designing, approving and translating them during the legislative process, and whether and how these ideas and values relate to each other. Moreover, from a methodological viewpoint, most contributions on reforms tend to adopt a comparative approach, laying their analysis on the grounds of historical explanations (Kuhlmann 2010;Ongaro 2011;Kickert 2005) or normative (Hood and Peters 2004;Marty et al 2006), descriptive and exploratory analyses (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011;Cheung 2012).…”

Institutional Hybridity in Public Sector Reform: Replacement, Blending, or Layering of Administrative Paradigms

“…In the literature, administrative paradigms are approached from an ex-ante or an ex-post perspective (Dingwerth & Pattberg, 2006): On the one hand, they can be seen as normative constructs which define values, problems, solutions, causal relationships, instruments, and actors, and provide prescriptive directions for reform action, often being advocated by knowledge entrepreneurs like international organizations or consulting firms (Fleischer & Jann, 2011;Lapsley, 2009; for normative descriptions of NPM and New Public Governance see, for instance, European Commission, 2001;OECD, 1990). In this way, administrative paradigms provide reference points for how reforms are framed (Hyndman et al, 2014). On the other hand, on an analytical level, reform trends and developments of a certain period of time are ordered and classified into paradigms by researchers expost (Klijn, 2012;Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011); this means that administrative paradigms represent an "umbrella term for a collection of trends" (van de Walle & Hammerschmid, 2011, p. 191) observed in a certain time period.…”

“…With regard to blending, Pache and Santos (2013b) and Rao et al (2005) point to the fact that, very often, only a selection of elements from the original logics are combined. The notion of layering (also referred to as 'sedimentation' [Hyndman et al 2014;Olsen, 2009], on the other hand, conceptualizes hybridity in a way that the various elements, or clusters thereof, are added on top of or alongside each other, similar to sediment layers in geology (e.g., Cooper, Hinings, Greenwood, & Brown, 1996;Liguori, 2012;Marquis & Tilcsik, 2013;Streeck & Thelen, 2005;Mahoney & Thelen, 2010). Raynard, Lounsbury, and Greenwood (2013, p. 2) call such sedimentation the "legacy effect of past logics".…”

“…In order to distinguish between different forms of hybridity, we draw on a 'vocabulary approach' (Loewenstein, Ocasio, & Jones, 2012): Echoing Mills (1940, we argue that each administrative paradigm is characterized by distinct core ideas and provides a characteristic vocabularyand that, consequently, an analysis of the vocabularies used makes visible the administrative paradigms and the field-level logics that shape them. We argue that a co-occurrence analysis of such characteristic vocabularies will be able to visualize the constellations of paradigms (and their underlying) logics at different points in time (e.g., Hyndman, Liguori, Meyer, Polzer, Rota, & Seiwald, 2014;Meyer, EggerPeitler, Höllerer, & Hammerschmid 2014). In a nutshell, our empirical analysis finds no indication for a parallel co-existence or transitional combination of logics (i.e., replacement), but hybridity in the form of robust combinations: All field-level logics and administrative paradigms are present over the entire period.…”