The aim of this paper is to analyse the mediating role of accounting practices in the personalised provision of public welfare services. It explores how personal budgets are used to include persons with mental disabilities into a population of customers, employers and entrepreneurs – who are heralded as prime example of “active citizens”.
In order to analyse the relation between the political agenda of personalisation and local budget accounting practices, the paper draws on Foucault’s concept of neo-liberal governmentality to (re-)include deviant individuals into society. Governmentality studies have been especially helpful for understanding how accounting can serve as technology of government to ascribe economic rationality and responsibility to individuals, render individual behaviour visible and to associate it with collective goals. Governmentality allows to conceptionalize accounting practices as “mediating instruments” between actors and domains (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2011; Miller and O’Leary, 2007) that link the ongoing accountingisation of public sector organizations with the increased tendencies of individualization and self-regulation.
Empirically, this study draws on a qualitative case study, involving 32 interviews and three participant observations, and explores how personal budgets were provided to individuals with disabilities in a federal state of Germany.
The findings of this study show how personal budgets involve intensified and multiple mediations between state institutions and individualized social care on a conceptional, methodological and social level. Individual budget users are addressed as the experts for their lives who know best which assistant services they want to buy. Personal budgets ‘normalise’ their lives by providing them with autonomous access to markets of care services and focusing on their personal ‘will’ instead of their presumed ‘need’. While personal budgets emphasise the participation and self-management capacities of individuals, (informal) personal support networks compensate individual disabilities by managing their budgets on behalf of disabled persons.
This paper aims to contribute to public sector accounting research in the following ways: it is among the first studies to explore the role of accounting in personalised public services. It provides a detailed description of the mediating capacity of personal budgets and how this facilitates the personalization of public services on a conceptional, methodological and social level. It suggests that budgets allow to collectively perform rationality on the account of individual budget users that enables them to participate in society more fully. The paper argues that social inclusion is co-produced by state institutions and individual citizens who draw on the mediating capacity of personal budgets.
References
Kurunmäki, L., Miller, P., 2011. Regulatory hybrids: Partnerships, budgeting and modernising government. Management Accounting Research 22, 220–241.
Miller, P., O’Leary, T., 2007. Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 32, 701–734. doi:10.1016/j.aos.2007.02.003
JJunne_2018_MediatingCapacityOfBudgetsInPersonalisedPublicServices_IRSPM-Edinburgh.pdf 