Customer Orientation and Management Control in the Public Sector: A Garbage Can Analysis

Abstract

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.

Acknowledgements

The research was funded by the Swedish Research Council and was partly completed whilst the first author held a Marie Curie scholarship at Manchester Business School. Previous versions were presented at the Fifth International Conference on Accounting, Auditing and Management in Public Sector Reforms, Amsterdam (2008), the MARG conference at Aston Business School (2008), the Sixth EIASM Conference on New Directions in Management Accounting, Brussels (2008), the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting conference, Innsbruck (2009), and a seminar at Warwick Business School. The authors gratefully acknowledge comments on earlier drafts by Thomas Ahrens, Trevor Hopper, Sue Llewellyn, Antti Rautiainen and Bob Scapens. We are particularly grateful for the detailed and constructive advice offered by two anonymous reviewers and Salvador Carmona (the Editor).

Notes

By institutional theory, we mainly refer to new (or neo-) institutional sociology as opposed to other institutional perspectives informing management accounting research (see Dillard et al., 2004; Moll et al., 2006).

This ‘expert culture’ is underpinned by the preponderance of staff with a civil engineering background but is also reinforced by the civil service ethos permeating Swedish central government agencies.

A wide variety of options.

The number of participants at these seminars (in addition to the task force) varied between 25 and 30.