Customer Orientation and Management Control in the Public Sector
A Garbage Can Analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19446298 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fredrika Wiesel (Stockholm University), Sven Modell (0000-0002-5874-0189, Manchester College, corresponding author), Jodie Moll (0000-0001-7975-7783, University of Manchester) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 551-581 |
| Publication date | 2011-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Accounting Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0963-8180 • E-ISSN: 1468-4497 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09638180.2010.522778 |
| OpenAlex | W1966369842 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Recent public sector reforms have increasingly tended to re-cast citizens as ‘customers’. This paper explores the implications of such customer orientation efforts for management control based on a field study in a Swedish central government agency. We extend prior research on this topic, informed by critical and institutional theories, with insights from the garbage can literature and focus on a key decision-making process involved in making extant management control practices more customer-focused. Our analysis nuances the predictions of critical scholars, suggesting that customer orientation initiatives will commodify public services and narrow the interests served by public sector organizations. In doing so, we draw attention to how conflicting institutional arrangements fostered a garbage can situation hampering radical change in management control practices. Our garbage can analysis provides a bridge between critical and institutional perspectives by re-instating a focus on decision-making. We show how the intricacies of decision-making may moderate the power embedded in novel management control practices and foster inertia and unintended outcomes. Our analysis also raises important policy implications pertaining to the possibilities of combining customer orientation efforts with rationing of public services
Audit · Business · Managerialism · Market Orientation · New public management · Political science · Public relations · Public sector · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Accounting and Organizational Management · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Public Administration · Public Policy and Administration Research · Accounting · Marketing
Ambiguity and choice in organizations
Creating Citizen-Consumers
Strategies for Theorizing from Process Data
Customer Focus – An Accountability Dilemma
Institutional and negotiated order perspectives on cost allocations
Agreeing on Problems, Where are the Solutions? A Reply to Quattrone
‘ We have never been Post-modern ’
On the Analysis of Observational Data
Adapting Total Quality Management (TQM) to Government
Policing With a Smile
Customer Care and the Public Service Ethos
The Dilemma of the Unsatisfied Customer in a Market Model of Public Administration
Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service
Creating Citizen-Consumers
Recycling the Garbage Can
Garbage Cans, New Institutionalism, and the Study of Politics
| Highly cited | No |
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