Navigating a Network of Competing Demands Accountability as Issue Formulation and Role Attribution across Organisational Boundaries

Abstract: Organisations are constantly called on to justify their actions to internal and external constituents. What happens if these constituents have divergent or conflicting opinions of what constitutes misconduct? This thesis uses the case of accountability for publicly financed elderly care performed by private providers to explore this question.The study demonstrates how accountability can be conceptualized as an ongoing process concerned with answering two questions: what constitutes satisfactory or unsatisfactory conducts, and who is accountable to whom? Both the private care providers and the municipal regions that finance them make continuous efforts to shape the answers to these questions by drawing on different forms of accounting information, norms, and influence in the course of their accountability processes.These local processes are affected by and interact with a surrounding network of direct and indirect accountability relationships between national supervision agencies, the media, elderly care clients, clients’ families, and the care providers’ and regions’ own hierarchies. The study argues that the dilemmas created by this network mean that care providers and regions are on the one hand trying to influence their mutual accountability processes to their own advantage, while on the other working as one unit to navigate overlapping areas of accountability, mutual dependency, and the unpredictability of external demands.