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The past two decades have seen an increase in personal mobility; people are often transferred by their companies to divisions in other countries. As a result, interactions between members of different cultures are prevalent in organizations; such interactions can cause miscommunication and conflict unless people understand the meaning and assumptions underlying communicative behavior such as account‐giving. Unfortunately, there has been little conceptual or empirical work examining effective account‐giving and account evaluation in intercultural situations. In an attempt to fill this gap in the literature, this paper presents a literature review and develops a theoretical model of the relationships among culture, face concerns, account‐giving, and evaluation of accounts.

Focusing on Sanitarium, a commercial‐charity operating as a department of a church, the paper aims to use Mashaw's taxonomy to examine this organisation's informal reporting in the context of accountability.

The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on data gathered from primary and secondary archival sources, interviews with key informants, and reports in the public media.

The paper examines Sanitarium, a hybrid organisation that has made informal account giving its primary means of reporting to constituents and the general public. It reveals that while the informal reporting blurs the boundaries of reporting regimes, the informal account always discloses something more, has the spirit of accountability and provides insight into the organisation that otherwise would not be accessible. The paper shows the usefulness of applying Mashaw's framework to examine the accountability practices of organisations in the third sector.

The paper extends understanding into the nature of accountability by highlighting the contribution of informal account giving, the role of stakeholder perceptions in determining what counts as accountability, and the benefits of using a framework that can be applied to all commercial organisations, including faith organisations. The paper focuses on an area of study that has been acknowledged as under‐researched and contributes to the knowledge of accountability in religious organisations.

This paper explores why and how, and in what context, individuals' accounting of self, ethics and morality and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability can frame their account giving and judging in an organisational formal performance evaluation process.

Building upon the Butlerian notions of accountability as advanced by Messner (2009) and Roberts (2009), the authors conducted a qualitative field study at a Vietnamese public university, involving face-to-face interviews, observation of performance evaluation meetings and examination of archival documents.

The authors found that individuals experience conflicting ethical and moral values when they rely on their self-knowledge of accountability (the ability to self-account) in their account giving and judging in the university's formal academic performance evaluation process. In addition, the authors found that when individuals want to provide the best account to the account demander, their understanding of their ability to self-account and the formal organisational accountability process influence their views on what authentic account giving means. As a result, enhanced ethics-to-others has the potential to be an ethical burden and may not lead to authentic or beyond minimum accounting of “self”. Yet, in the Vietnamese socio-cultural and political context within which the university operates, and in the situation of ethical and moral conflicts in self-accountability, the authors found evidence of individuals' self-accountability behaviours that is based on the co-existence of a sense of responsibility to others and self-knowledge of the limits of accountability.

Although this study was limited to one Vietnamese public university, its findings enhance the knowledge about how individual ethical and moral values, self-knowledge of the limits of accountability and the formal organisational accountability process connect with each other in the socio-cultural and political context within which an organisation operates.

The study highlights the role of the context of local socio-cultural norms and values and of physical social interaction in developing the sense of connection to others, which influences the way individuals' ethical and moral values are mobilised to shape account-giving and judging behaviours.

The emphasis on the role of the sense of connection to others on personal accountability and the emphasis on physical, face-to-face interaction in developing sense of connection to others leads to an interesting issue regarding the sense of connection in the virtual social interaction setting, which has become increasingly popular globally, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and its implication for the use of personal ethical and moral values in organisational accountability practices.

Adding to the conversation on how a formal organisational accountability process can be effective, this study identified (1) the unpredictable outcomes of using ethics as rules for accountability practices due to potentially conflicting ethical values; (2) the diverse understandings of self-accounting, leading to different ideas of authentic accounting; and (3) the possibility of moral accountability behaviours based on the co-existence of a sense of connection to others and an understanding of the limits of accountability.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accountability in times of exception. The Italian government's account-giving practices are critically analysed with respect to the distinct modes in which duties of accountability are discharged for the exceptional measures taken during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020.

This paper draws on an exploratory case study. The case analysis draws primarily on data obtained through publicly available documents and covers the period between January 1 and August 7, 2020.

The paper reveals that the Italian government employed various accountability styles (rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive). Each style influenced both how the government justified its conduct and how it sought to form distinctive relationships with social actors.

The paper uses the notion of “styles of accountability” to empirically illustrate how an unprecedented public governance challenge can reveal broader accountability trends. The paper contributes to accountability research by elucidating how governments tackle ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems of public accountability in extraordinary times.

This study aims to explore the engagement between accounting and music in the social and relational construction of accountability. The authors conceive this construction as a dynamic and recursive interplay between the giving of different accounts and the responses that these accounts provoke. The authors investigate the emotional dimension of this interplay, as it is also triggered by music, feeding back into how accountability is constructed and evolves over time.

This study relies upon a historical analysis of archival and secondary sources about the main music concert organized in 1913 by the founder of “Accademia Chigiana”, one of the leading music academies in Italy. The concert celebrated the first centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, a worldwide famous Italian music composer, and icon of Italian national sentiment.

This study shows that music and accounting were profoundly intertwined in the social and relational construction of accountability for the 1913 concert. Accountability evolved through different accounts, also linked to music, and the complex emotional reactions these accounts provoked in the audiences, citizens, media and institutions, leading to always further responses and accounts in the ongoing construction of accountability.

This study extends prior literature on the chameleonic nature of accountability, as well as on its relational and emotional dimensions. The study shows that accountability is relationally constructed and evolves over time through the giving of accounts and the emotional reaction they provoke from others, feeding into further responses and accounts of the accountable subject. The authors show how the chameleonic nature of accountability permeates not only the accounts and the relations of accountability but also the subjects giving and demanding the accounts: these subjects change as chameleons through their interactions and emotions, feeding into the dynamic construction of accountability. The authors also show how arts, like music, can participate in the chameleonic nature of accountability and of its subjects, precisely by engaging with their emotional reactions and responses.

While a relationship between accountability and ethics has long been assumed and debated in Public Administration, the nature of that relationship has not been examined or clearly articulated. This article makes such an effort by positing four major forms of accountability (answerability, blameworthiness, liability and attributability) and focusing on the ethical strategies developed in response to each of these forms

This study used a critical incidents methodology to examine the influence of accounts on perceived social loafing and evaluations of team member, and to investigate the face management and responsibility explanations of account‐giving. The results of this study suggest that communicative acts such as accounts may reduce perceived loafing. In addition, perceived loafing and evaluations of the team member were influenced by the type of account provided; concessions were more effective in decreasing perceptions of social loafing and increasing evaluations of the team member than excuses and justifications which, in turn, were more effective than refusals. These findings indicate tentative support for the face management explanation of account effectiveness.

Changes in the traditional values, institutional context, and choice of change programs are currently shaping the postmodern science and practice of organization development (OD). These changes manifest themselves in powerful new value orientations, intervention frameworks, and practices that challenge OD's long-held beliefs in ethical and justice-based treatment. In this effort, traditional and new paradigm ethical dilemmas are explored, as well as their relationship to four postmodern practices and five emergent intervention techniques. Components of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice are explained relative to change management programs generally, and to emergent techniques specifically. Published case illustrations are used to depict new paradigm ethical dilemmas and opportunities to create a “just change.”

The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) was created at the end of the 20th century to meet the needs of the new Scottish Parliament. With the opportunity to start afresh, this paper seeks to analyse the most important elements on which new services were based.

A discursive account giving a general overview.

Library and information services increasingly face the challenge of justifying the value they are adding to their organisation. Experience showed the following requirements to be crucial factors in achieving this goal: the need to align your service with the objectives of your organisation, the need to build and maintain your credibility and the need to meet your customers face to face.

This narrative approach provides material for further research and more theoretical analysis of the relationship between government and its supporting information services.

There are so few examples of establishing new parliamentary information services that this analysis of the initial and continuing challenges involved in creating such a service is uniquely instructive.