The Internalization of Accountability

Abstract

The problem with the legitimating ideology of marketization and managerialism is that it portrays efficiency as a technical problem. The advocates of the managerial restructuring of the welfare state couch their propositions as politically neutral, when effectively they establish priorities between conflicting demands for education and health care. As Broadfoot (1985: 274) argues convincingly, ‘the criteria on which accountability is to be based can be couched in terms that conceal the value assumptions on which they are based’. This chapter focuses on the internalization of accountability within organizations aimed at providing services in kind, such as public schools and hospitals. The existing literature on public accountability is noticeably silent about the effects of new managerialism on politicians and political accountability in welfare bureaucracies. Most of the research, on the contrary, is concerned with central departments or executive agencies and with managerial types of accountability.