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The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise our understanding of public value accounting (PVA) by studying the use and usefulness of performance measurements (PM) as a management tool. The authors do this from a perspective in which they address the complexity of various (sometimes conflicting) assessments of performance measurement and management (PMM) by different stakeholders.

An interpretative case study using qualitative methods. The paper is based on 30 interviews conducted in 2018 and 2019 with respondents working with PMM at different levels, such as politicians, officials and health-care professionals. The study context was Region Stockholm (RS) in Sweden and its health-care division.

PMs become an instrumental tool for PMM, which led to output being promoted above outcome. The authors show that there is a conceptual shortcoming in the discussion of PVA, as the effort needed to achieve outcome-based information might exceed the ability of an organisation to deliver it. The authors address the importance of studying the interaction among different stakeholders, including politicians, the public and media, in research on PVA, as well as possible power relationships among stakeholders.

The authors contribute to the growing research on PVA and its call for more empirical research by offering a more nuanced interpretation of PVA activities. The authors do this by studying PMM and the nature of these activities in a public sector organisation from a multiple-stakeholder perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of public value in practice by applying Moore's (1995) strategic triangle as an analytical framework to study strategic management and management control practices in relation to public value.

The paper uses an interpretative longitudinal case study approach including qualitative methods of document studies and interviews between 2017 and 2019.

In the strategic triangle, the three nodes of authorising environment, public value creation and operational capacity are interdependent, and alignment is a necessity for a strategy to be successful. But this alignment is vulnerable. The findings suggest three propositions: (1) strategic alignment is vulnerable to management control practices having a strong focus on performance measurements, (2) strategic alignment is vulnerable to standardised management control practices and (3) strategic alignment is vulnerable to politically driven management control practices.

With the strategic triangle as a base, this paper tries to understand what kind of management control practices enable and/or constrain public value, as there has been a call for this kind of research. In this way it adds to earlier research on public value, to the growing interest in the strategic triangle as an analytical framework in analysing empirical material and to the request for more empirical studies on the subject. The strategic triangle also embraces political factors, government agendas and political leadership for which there has also been a call for more research.

The purpose of this paper is to study how different types of trust develop and change over time in the collaboration between an organization and its board.

This paper is a response to a recent call to apply the concept of trust in understanding the collaboration between a public organization, its board, and other stakeholders. Here, the authors study a single case, and based on a longitudinal in-depth case study method covering the period of 2003–2015, the authors have conducted 27 interviews, including the CEO and all the board members.

The authors introduce and advance the concept of trust in the public sector literature on board work. This paper shows that trust is complex and multidimensional at different units of analysis. The types of trust discussed in this paper are cognitive, affective, contractual, competence, and goodwill. Different types of trust are developed to make the collaboration between a governed organization and its board to work.

Because this paper uses the case study method and only studies one single case, the findings of this paper might be questioned on the issue of generalization.

The authors conceptualize and adopt trust as a multidimensional, dynamic concept, and with different units of analyses, capture the nature of the collaboration between a public organization and its board, and its complexity.

The objective of this paper is to generate further knowledge about strategic management accounting (SMA) in the public sector context. The authors attempt to do this through a study of SMA work in a public sector agency (PSA), the Swedish Transport Administration (STA). The paper elaborates on the formation of the agency's strategies and the challenges the agency's SMA work had to deal with, and focuses its analysis on the interplay between SMA and the characteristics of the public sector as well as how it is constitutive of strategy.

The empirical material was gathered between 2013 and 2015 and consists of documents that include the STA's appropriation, mandate, strategic and operational plans, and balanced scorecard, as well as interviews with 35 civil servants at various levels of the STA.

The study finds that, depending on the performances of PSAs in their specific environment and the influences from the environment's constituents, SMA may function as an instrument that makes or breaks strategies. The characteristics of the public sector context may therefore affect SMA, and by extension, strategy, in several ways. First, the present case shows that the inherent reduction that the focus of SMA techniques entails, and their inability to deal with the complexity of a PSA's context, places them at constant risk of becoming strategically irrelevant in the eyes of knowledgeable local managers in a PSA. Second, interventions from the government may override a PSA's SMA and in effect make a PSA's strategic focus ambiguous. Third, outside monitoring performed by such actors as the National Audit Office and the mass media may influence a PSA's SMA work both directly and indirectly when the agency and the government are responsive to the agenda set by such scrutiny.

The paper broadens the scope of earlier SMA research in the public sector by including the specific characteristics of the public sector in the analysis and how accounting techniques may come to compete for strategic placement as they are propelled from within and from without the organization.

Over the past several years there have been intensive discussions about the importance of knowledge management within our society. The management of knowledge is promoted as an important and necessary factor for organisational survival and maintenance of competitive strength. To remain at the forefront organisations need a good capacity to retain, develop, organise, and utilise their employees’ capabilities. Knowledge and the management of knowledge appear to be regarded as increasingly important features for organisational survival. Explores knowledge management with respect to its content, its definition and domain in theory and practice, its use and implications, and to point out some problems inherent in the concept. The main contribution of this paper is an extensive literature survey on knowledge management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the idea of health statements is constructed and on what assumptions it rests.

Published health statements from the Swedish municipality of Umeå are analysed in terms of the rhetoric of the arguments that are presented. This is done in order to identify the assumptions the arguments rest on.

Although no empirical proof is provided, the arguments presented in the health statements of Umeå municipality follow a logic that goes from success factors to good results via employee health and satisfaction as a proxy of internal quality of work that in turn is assumed to create good quality of service. The construction of that logic is concomitantly the production and reproduction of a moral system of values that rest on the ambiguousness and implicitness.

A discussion about the assumptions expressed in Umeå municipality's health statements, how they are constructed to make the management accounting of employee health work and the construction of morals that is implicit in that system.

Taking a micro-perspective of governance that includes problem-solving and stakeholder involvement capabilities as part of the strategic steering role, we wish to contribute to the understanding of the human side of governance. Thus we have studied the relationships between the board and its management and stakeholders, and in so doing we recognize internal and external actors as well as the board itself, and how they all contribute to the implementation of the governance function.

Based on an interpretative approach that focuses on change over time, we performed a qualitative empirical study of the governance of Robotdalen, a small non-profit public organization in Sweden that is a joint public and private collaboration. This chapter forms part of a longitudinal study that has been carried out since 2009. It is based primarily on interviews with board members, management and other stakeholders, and complemented by document studies and observations.

Governance practice entails multiple and multilevel tasks, and the tensions between representativeness/professional boards, conformance/performance, and controlling/partnering up with management, are prevalent in both small non-profit and public organizations. According to our results the apparent choice between the extremes of each tension is, however, not a choice at all but rather a balancing act. In trying to balance tensions through collaboration between managers, board, financiers, and the hosting university, new governance structures and practices emerge at the organizational level.

By following the process of the emergence of a new board, we illustrate how various actors work together to co-produce governance functions in practice. In the past little or no effort has been made to take into account contextual factors such as organizational size – an aspect that may influence or shape board characteristics and work methodology. We therefore attempt to do so in our chapter, by studying the emergence of a new board in a small public organization, what possible paradoxes and tensions are involved in such work, and how such tensions are managed.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the case for taking employee health and wellbeing into account in some way and to consider a range of objections that might be raised against such exercises.

The paper identifies the existence of a persistent sickness absence as a cause for concern for a range of stakeholders and how it might be accounted for in the light of recent developments within the intellectual capital field. Attention then turns to some of the difficulties such well meaning interventions might encounter, and briefly considers how a self‐accounting approach might in some part overcome these.

The paper finds that a programme of empirical research within the field of employee health and wellbeing is now required to ensure that employee health and wellbeing into account.

While predominantly a discursive contribution to the literature, the paper incorporates some discussion of innovative accounting interventions.

In contrast to viewing sickness absence from a cost perspective, the paper encourages stakeholders to embrace a wider spectrum of ways of seeing to better understand employee health and wellbeing issues in the work place.

The purpose of the paper is to reflect on how sensegiving cues are encapsulated in models of reporting for human resources. This has been by investigating elements, arguments and formats of the models.

This paper focuses on the three discourses of human resource reporting that Jan‐Erik Gröjer is a part of. This paper is an appreciation of the importance of Jan‐Erik's work in the field of human resource communication as well as an illustration of how ideas and models changes over time.

The paper concludes that: there is no coherent idea of how sensegiving should be made in order to affect the sensemaking processes of human resources, the models emanate from different forms of critiques and the sensegiving cues change accordingly, and accounting for human resources has an ethical dimension.

The choice of model for reporting on human resources affects not only the content of the human resource report (the what and how question), but also affected by which arguments are considered as most efficient in the sensegiving process..

The paper contributes to the understanding of how sensemaking is dependent on which sensegiving cues bring forward in the accounts of human accounts.