REDUCING ACCOUNTABILITY TO ACCOUNTING: EXPLORING THE PRACTICES OF ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC SECTOR By TAREK RANA A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Business UNSW Canberra University of New South Wales October 2015 i ii ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’ iii DEDICATION I dedicate this thesis to my parents for their unconditional love and continuous support from the day I was born. It was their dream that inspired me to pursue a PhD at my age, though they never had such an opportunity. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The construction and organisation of this thesis has been a long, tedious but mostly enjoyable process in my life. During the course of preparing and writing this thesis I have incurred an enormous number of debts to people who deserve my gratitude and appreciation. First, to Him who makes the impossible possible and shows us the right way to discover understanding. I also wish to acknowledge the following people and institutions for their help and guidance which made this thesis possible. I am particularly grateful to Professor Kerry Jacobs for his inspirational vision and supervision of this thesis. Without his continuous support and confidence, this thesis would not have been possible. His love of interdisciplinary, critical and practice research inspired me to embark on this project. His helpful suggestions and criticisms shaped the direction of the thesis. From day one, he has subjected the ideas of the research to very careful scrutiny and shared the pain of turning those ideas into a thesis. I have learnt a great deal from his persistent queries about the ‘logic of things’ and warnings about the ‘things of logic’. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor Dr David Lacey for his suggestions and encouragement of my work. I am highly indebted to Mr Pat Barrett AO, Commonwealth Auditor General (1995- 2005) and Senior Research Fellow, Australian National University, for his excellent guidance and support over the duration of my candidature. He has been instrumental in securing access for field studies within the Australian Public Sector (APS). I am also grateful to Dr. Wendy Jarvie, Professorial Fellow, UNSW Canberra, who helped me to secure some valuable interviews across the APS. I wish to thank all my anonymous interviewees and their staff for their valuable co-operation and making space in their busy schedules and sharing their everyday practices of accountability. I wish to acknowledge the substantial care of Professor Michael O’Donnell, Head of the School, and the continuous support of Dr Keiran Sharpe, HDR Coordinator, in producing this thesis on time. I would also like to thank all of the administrative staff in the School of Business for their generous time in answering all my inquiries. I acknowledge my good colleagues and friends Peter Graves and Luke Forau for all their v positive encouragements and supports during my time at the UNSW. I also wish to acknowledge the generous support of UNSW Canberra for the University College Postgraduate Research Scholarship (UCPRS) and the Department of Education for the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA). To this end, my wife Afsana has endured my research over the duration of this PhD project. For her support, tolerance, encouragement, and love I am extremely grateful. Lots of love to our boys (Sabir and Jabir), who have sacrificed countless opportunities to spend time with their dad while this thesis was in the making. They will continue to be a great source of inspiration for the rest of my life. Finally, but importantly, during the past four years that I have spent on this thesis, I drew heavily on the moral support and encouragement of my parents, siblings, family, friends and colleagues. To all of them, I remain obliged. vi ABSTRACT There is a growing body of work on accountability in the accounting literature. However, most of the existing literature focusses on the concepts of accountability rather than its practice. Accounting literature suggests that understanding accountability is important and significant for public sector accounting, which is built around the notion of accountability. There are two major but inter-related influences on accountability thinking in accounting. The first is the new public management (NPM) literature, and the second has been the distinction between individualising and socialising forms of accountability. The NPM theories stress a struggle between multiple concepts of accountability, such as financial, managerial, legal, public, political and constitutional. This theoretical struggle in the literature has made accountability more confusing, complex, contradictory and different. To overcome this, some scholars point towards a need to go beyond the conceptual struggle and to focus more on the practice. Hence, the research problem focusses on the practice of accountability in the public sector and how this informs our academic understanding of accountability. This study is motivated by several factors: (i) the importance and significance of accountability for public sector accounting; (ii) the struggles between multiple concepts of accountability in the literature; (iii) the scarcity of practice research on accountability; (iv) the paucity of empirical research of the role of accounting in those practices, and (v) the inability of existing theoretical frameworks to explain accountability comprehensively. Motivated by these factors, I examined the practices of accountability in the Australian Public Sector (APS) and explored the role of accounting in those practices. Drawing on Bourdieu’s practice theory, an analytical framework was developed. This framework allowed me to focus on: (i) the relational and differential character of accountability; (ii) the conceptualisation of the public sector as a network of multiple fields; (iii) the expectation of different practices of accountability in those fields; and (iv) the ways in which accounting came to be implicated in those practices. Based on Bourdieu’s sequential field study methods, data was collected from 103 interviews with public servants who were employed at different levels and professional or functional groups from 34 federal government organisations in Canberra, Australia. vii Overall data was collected from multiple sources, such as interviews, conversations, observations, focus group discussions and review of a wide range of documents. The major conclusions of this study are that: (i) there is little difference in the practices of accountability between different organisations, professional or functional groups, and hierarchical positions; (ii) accountability has become a compliance activity with accounting processes supported by accounting logic; (iii) while accounting became a form of symbolic capital in the public sector field the accountants or accounting profession lost cultural capital; and (iv) management accounting has the potential to improve accountability for performance in the public sector. I argue that accountability in the public sector should be more than just financial, and the current financial accounting and reporting based accountability practices have increased compliance acitivites, but failed to achieve the desired outcomes or impact to enhance public benefit. Therefore, how the public sector engages with the practices of accountability should be the focus of public sector accounting and reform studies, rather than the normative, descriptive and theoretical struggles of what accountability is and how it should be understood. Keywords: Accounting, Accountability, Australian Public Sector, New Public Management, Performance Measurement, Financial and Non-Financial Information, Compliance Processes, Bourdieu, Habitus, Field, Social Spaces, Capital, Strategy, Doxa. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ORIGINALITY STATEMENT ........................................................................................ ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. v ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................... vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... ix LIST OF ACRONYMS/ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................ xiii LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... xv LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xvi CHAPTER ONE ............................................................................................................