Introduction: new accountabilities

Abstract

If cultures are always in the making, the contributors to this book have caught one kind of culture on the make. It is informed by practices confined to no single set of institutions and to no one part of the world. Recognizable in the most diverse places, these practices also drive very local concerns. They determine the allocation of resources and can seem crucial to the credibility of enterprises; people become devoted to their implementation; they evoke a common language of aspiration. They also evoke anxiety and small resistances, are held to be deleterious to certain goals, and as overdemanding if not outright damaging. An old name is used for the new phenomenon: accountability. Its dual credentials in moral reasoning and in the methods and precepts of financial accounting go back a long way. But over the last two decades, and in numerous contexts, it has acquired a social presence of a new kind.

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