Purpose –The aim of the paper is to illustrate the changing structure of accountability under a new public governance agenda introduced in England to deliver social care through personal budgets. Design/methodology/approach -The paper draws on accountability and public governance literature,...

Lean Six Sigma is a method for strategic process improvement that aims to improve operational uniformity and quality, and reduce variations and waste. Lean thinking and Six Sigma have traditionally been applied to manufacturing. This paper examines ways of using Lean Six Sigma in healthcare...

An interest in new cost management techniques has driven the attention of research and practitioners towards the new managerial approaches. However, the main focus has been on production costs, introducing innovative production systems (TPS or WCM) and related cost accounting metrics (Lean...

Social and environmental reporting (SER) in the public sector has been widelydiscussed in the last years (Gray et al., 1996; Mathews, 1997; Parker 2005; Guthrieand Abeysekera, 2006; Guarini, 2002; Hinna 2004; Marcuccio and Steccolini,2005). However, despite the interest in this area of research, there are still a...

Purpose – This article aims to focus on one of the most intriguing issues related to the public sector reforms: the accountability systems. In particular the paper aims to deal with the relationships between accounting-based reforms, forms of accountability, and people-changing or...

Purpose: Risk management (RM) is receiving increasing academic and practitioner attention in the public sector. Despite this, there is a lack of systematization of this body of knowledge. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the state of art by examining the knowledge gaps and defining the...

Purpose: Inspite of the attention resilience receives in relation to public policy and public management, very few studies have analysed the internal mechanics of public sector organisations to see what is producing their resilience. Considering management control systems (MCSs) as the drivers...