Accounting information is often used by politicians and policy makers as a “manifest” or “hidden” rational for many critical public decisions, mixing accounting principles and measures with others guiding lights of the public discourse, such as public values, public interests, citizens’ needs. The focus on measurement as a driver for public choices has been in vogue in the public arena since the 90es with the New Public Management era, but today new challenges are pushed forward by some global trends such as an increase pressure on external and internal accountability (Kroll, 2015). When dealing with public domain characterized by high complexity, changing environments and wicked problems (such as social care policies) accounting information might play a decisive role in shaping the decision making process, given that the trade-off between resources and desired objectives is often critical.
Accounting literature has been focusing both on accounting roles in society (Burchell et al., 1980) and on the extent and typologies of information uses in different processes, but the issue of how accounting information plays a part in public decision making processes across different stages and for different contexts is still to be explored (Swieringa, 1998; Askim, 2007; Van Helden, 2016).
Given these premises, the aim of this paper is to shed light on the roles that accounting plays in the development of public policies, such as social care policies. The focus is on accounting at works in the subsequent phases of the decision making process, following the dynamic evolution of how decisions are taken and by who. The analysis will be based on a processual approach looking at how accounting roles and uses changes along the different stages of decision making process (following Lasswell, 1956: agenda-setting, policy formulation and formal decision-making). An explorative approach will be adopted, moving from multiple case studies dealing with decision making processes undertaken in Italian municipalities in the social care sector. The case studies (at least 10 municipalities) will be built through interviews with actors involved in the decisions and expressing both the political and managerial point of view, and more specifically: the city councilors for social care, the social care services director and public manager in charge of the issue together with those in charge of the planning and budgeting in the social care directorate.
Given the specificities of social care issues, and their nature of wicked problems, a second analytical dimension will be added, to differentiate the features of the public decisions under consideration. Two dimensions will be used to select and compare the decision making processes: internal vs external decisions (meaning involving organizational units or organizations different from the original one); with an impact on resource allocation vs without an impact on resource allocation.
This paper will provide an original perspective on accounting at works in complex decision making processes from a dynamic perspective. This will be useful to advance knowledge about accounting information uses, moving from static categorizations about typologies of uses and users, and providing insights about mechanisms.
Accounting and accountability of value creation in innovative public service delivery arra
