The obligation of accountability

On the obligation of accountability
Hervé Dumez

PRESAJE Institute has asked a work group from the AEGIS research program, coordinated by Hervé Dumez, to reflect on the concept of accountability. This familiar concept, whereby a person who acts on behalf of an organization must account for his actions, raises more problems than expected. Coming from this work group, the articles on this theme inquire into how accountability is put into practice in firms, hospitals and research centers. This thematic issue reaches back to the origins of this concept in the British context.

 
The obligation to account in English law
Henry Mares

The English notion of accountability is hard to render in French, because it is hard to understand outside a long tradition of jurisprudence. Neither the same as responsibility or liability, nor as the possibility to incriminate someone for his actions, this notion’s relation with these other concepts varies from one field to another. To blame someone — whether a trustee, spy, employee, judge or minister — for his actions, it is sometimes necessary to prove that the person had an obligation to account for them. Recent developments in corporate law, given the rather broad range of information that companies quoted on the stock exchange must provide, could unsettle the finely wrought balance between accountability and responsibility, which has slowly evolved since the English Middle Ages. This article is published in its original language in order to allow readers to discover all the nuances necessary for a full understanding.

 
Accountability in firms: Theories and perceptions
Magali Ayache

What place do theories of corporate management assign to accountability? What perception do parties inside a firm have of it? The responses to these two questions gleaned during a survey of “middle managers” come as a surprise. The theories about how organizations operate have devoted little thought to this concept, and these managers’ perceptions of it are not what we expect. Accountability is perceived as a form of control rather than as a managerial tool; it has connotations so negative that other words are used: reporting, discussing, reviewing, etc. Nonetheless, managers spend their time accounting for their actions but in their own way and at their own pace.

“Building accounts” in a company in the construction industry

Bertrand Fauré

What are the implications of accountability in the building industry, which is continuously adjusting to the business cycle? The example reported herein has to do with budgetary controls at a construction site that was in the red. It sheds light on the interactions between the chief engineer, project director and comptroller as they try to present monthly budgetary reports that take into account the exigencies of both the site and annual budget. The complex dynamics of accountability provide us with a glimpse of an extremely codified system: the budget is built to be validated even if this means “troweling” over rough spots so as to appear responsible. This informal norm of aesthetics in bookkeeping might become a decisive factor for presenting managerial competence.

Ranking hospitals: A new method of accountability
Aurore Schilte and Étienne Minvielle

How to ask those who wield knowledge in a field where trust is essential to account for their actions? This is the crux of the issue in medicine. Not that medical professionals refuse the idea of accountability — on the contrary, the world of medicine has switched from opaque procedures of “self-evaluation” to an overexposure due to the rankings to which the media have given high visibility. Besides, accountability concerns not just expenditures but also the quality of care. Given the proliferation of rankings of hospitals in France, England, the United States and Canada, four forms of accountability have been distinguished depending on whether a person is held accountable to citizens, payers, patients or other professionals. But the situation is continuously shifting. The advantages, drawbacks and circumventions of current hospital rankings lead us to turn toward a new form of accountability that would represent a compromise between “control” over internal controls and the pursuit of democracy.

Researchers and the obligation to account
Margit Osterloh, Bruno S. Frey and Fabian Homberg

OVERLOOKED…

Orchestrating assets to remain competitive: Raytheon’s strategic trajectory
Colette Depeyre

What strategy can a firm adopt to remain competitive in a fast-changing environment? Are ideas and practices modified as fast as changes take place? The case of Raytheon in the American defense industry shows how a company tries to face the future in a permanently innovative way, how it constructs its “capacity to be dynamic”. During each major change in the environment (the end of the Cold War, the current technological revolution), Raytheon has tried to orchestrate its assets as best possible to anticipate the future: selling and buying assets while reorganizing — all this under scrutiny by the financial markets, which do not fail to pronounce judgment on the nomination of top executives. We imagine the uncertainty surrounding the success of this orchestration!

IN QUEST OF THEORIES

How to capitalize on the knowledge generated by R&D projects?
Gilda Simoni

The race to bring out new products is a central factor in a capitalistic economic system. Innovations must always be forthcoming so that people go on consuming. This accounts for the multiplication of R&D projects, a key sector in organizations. But how to capitalize on the knowledge coming from such projects so that all this energy and all these innovations serve for future projects without lost time and with maximum efficiency? Evidence from a case study in a multinational high-tech firm shows how much the forms and contexts of this capitalization of knowledge are decisive. The coexistence of distinct models in a firm reveals the importance of a “leader-group-situation triptych”. A decisive factor: how managers exercise leadership…

MOSAICS

Blanche Segrestin: Firms do not exist! Invent them! On Daniel Bachet’s Les fondements de l’entreprise — Construire une alternance à la domination financière (Éditions de l’Atelier, 2007).

Jean-Marc Weller: Disorder and organizations: On Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman’s A perfect mess: The hidden benefits of disorder (New York-Boston-London: Little, Brown & Company, 2006).