IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/scaman/v19y2003i2p251-273.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Accountability, responsibility and organization

Author

Listed:
  • Lindkvist, Lars
  • Llewellyn, Sue

Abstract

Societies achieve their purposes through organizations. But organizations may develop into instrumental entities bereft of ethical debate. Roberts (Account. Org. Soc. 16(4) (1991) 355) claims that their hierarchical accountability systems powerfully reinforce instrumentality and individualize accountability. Based on the Habermasian 'work' and 'interaction' dichotomy, he discusses ways of counteracting such consequences. We criticize this attempt in certain respects and propose a responsibility/accountability (R/A) framework--allowing for an extended exposition of individual senses of R/A, and of organizational forms that could contribute to promoting such senses. We believe that a framing of this kind should benefit analysis and facilitate a shift in focus away from top-down control and non-reflective accountability and towards individual agency and responsibility within the context of decentralized forms of organization.

Suggested Citation

  • Lindkvist, Lars & Llewellyn, Sue, 2003. "Accountability, responsibility and organization," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 251-273, June.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:scaman:v:19:y:2003:i:2:p:251-273
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956522102000271
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bracci, Enrico, 2009. "Autonomy, responsibility and accountability in the Italian school system," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 293-312.
    2. Qian, Wei & Parker, Lee & Zhu, Jingyu, 2024. "Corporate environmental reporting in the China context: The interplay of stakeholder salience, socialist ideology and state power," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(1).
    3. Sue Llewellyn, 2005. "Performance, Productivity and Innovation in Health Care Organisations: Comparing England and Scotland," Australian Accounting Review, CPA Australia, vol. 15(37), pages 15-24, November.
    4. Yasmin, Sofia & Ghafran, Chaudhry & Haniffa, Roszaini, 2018. "Exploring de-facto accountability regimes in Muslim NGOs," Accounting forum, Elsevier, vol. 42(3), pages 235-247.
    5. Chynoweth, Sarah K. & Zwi, Anthony B. & Whelan, Anna K., 2018. "Socializing accountability in humanitarian settings: A proposed framework," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 109(C), pages 149-162.
    6. O’Leary, Susan, 2017. "Grassroots accountability promises in rights-based approaches to development: The role of transformative monitoring and evaluation in NGOs," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 21-41.
    7. Paul M. Collier, 2008. "Stakeholder accountability," Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 21(7), pages 933-954, September.
    8. Shinyi Lin, 2016. "Social Contingency and Advising Accountability," SAGE Open, , vol. 6(1), pages 21582440166, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:scaman:v:19:y:2003:i:2:p:251-273. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/872/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.