Governance and accountability (Gover-nability) of multiple values of municipal corporations

Introduction

Municipal corporations (MCs) have been established in different parts of the world to provide local public services (such as infrastructure, utilities, education, health care, cultural and social services) under the influence of New Public Management (NPM) doctrines and related neoliberal ideologies (Thynne, 1994; Grossi and Reichard, 2008). Their hybrid organizational nature implies that their governance is permeated by a multiplicity of values.

Scant attention has been paid by previous scholars to how different actors (i.e. board members, auditors, controllers, CSR managers, etc.) and their values affect goals in hybrid municipal corporations and their role in the development of governance and accountability practices (Grossi et al., 2017). There is still limited research explicitly focusing on the role of the different actors in the design and implementation of governance and accountability practices in hybrid organizations (Skelcher and Smith 2015). Therefore, future research would likely benefit from studies inside municipal owned corporations as hybrid organizations (Pache & Santos, 2013; Seibel, 2015), seeking more in-depth insights into internal governance and accountability practices rather than investigations ‘from the outside’ or on interpretations based on what is written in different formal documents (Grossi et al., 2017).

The aim is to improve the theoretical and practical understanding of the drivers, obstacles, and tensions for value creation and the accounting implications in municipally owned corporations. The aim of this special issue is also to explore the role of governance and accountability practices to disclose multiple values created by municipal corporations, with a particular focus on the societal and public values. We encourage theoretical, conceptual and empirical submissions from different institutional contexts and by scholars across disciplines.
 

List of topics

Interesting topics for the papers include but are not limited to the following issues:

• How can we conceptualize, evaluate, and measure the multiples values, and performance of MCs?
   
• How do multiple values shape governance and accountability practices, and reversely, in MCs?
   
• How do governance and accountability practices aim to cope with the multiplicity of values in MCs?
   
• How can governments ensure that societal and public values and value creation are protected?
   
• How do corporate actors (i.e. board members, auditors, controllers, CSR managers, etc.) work to create governance and accountability practices in MCs? How is it possible to protect the public values in a context with multiple values and actors?
   
• How can citizens and other stakeholders be involved to create participatory governance and accountability practices in MCs?
   
• What are the effects of hybridity of MCs on value creation and the forms of accounting and accountability practices?
   

Special Issue online CIRIEC Workshop

The guest editors will run an online CIRIEC workshop on 21 and 22 September 2023, where authors will be given an opportunity to present and get feedback on their research. Deadline for submissions (full or work-in-progress papers formatted in line with IJPSM’s submission requirements) to the workshop is 31 August 2023 via email at: [email protected]
 

Key deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 08/01/2024

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 31/05/2024