Operationalising ethnicity in accountability: insights from an ethnic group within the Salvation Army

PurposeThis paper explores how ethnicity is implicated in an etic–emic understanding through day-to-day practices and how such practices meet external accountability demands. Addressing the broader question of how ethnicity presents in an accounting situation, it examines the mundane level responses to those accountability demands manifesting an operationalisation of the ethnicity of the people who make those responses.Design/methodology/approachThe study followed ethnomethodology principles whereby one of the researchers acted both as an active member and as a researcher within a Salvation Army congregation in Manchester (UK), while the others acted as post-fieldwork reflectors.FindingsThe conceivers and guardians of an accountability system relating to the Zimbabwean-Mancunian Salvationist congregation see account giving practices as they appear (etic), not as they are thought and interiorised (emic). An etic–emic misunderstanding on both sides occurs in the situation of a practice variation in a formal accountability system. This is due to the collision of one ethnic group's emics with the emics of conceivers. Such day-to-day practices are thus shaped by ethnic orientations of the participants who operationalise the meeting of accountability demands. Hence, while ethnicity is operationalised in emic terms, accounting is seen as an etic construct. Possible variations between etic requirements and emic practices can realise this operationalisation.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ findings were based on one ethnic group's emic construction of accountability. Further research may extend this to multi-ethnic settings with multiple etic/emic combinations.Originality/valueThis study contributed to the debate on both epistemological and methodological issues in accountability. As it is ill-defined or neglected in the literature, the authors offer a working conceptualisation of ethnicity – an operating cultural unit being implicated in both accounting and accountability.

Test design to measure the accuracy and tolerance of wheelchair basketball players

The aim of the research was to design a test to measure the accuracy of correction and tolerance for wheelchair basketball players, in addition to measuring the correction by its accuracy and tolerance from the playing areas of wheelchair basketball players. The research sample consisted of (40) players randomly selected from the players of seven teams Wheelchair basketball clubs, The researcher conducted personal interviews, in addition to conducting an exploratory experiment for the test and then extracted the scientific foundations for it, and after extracting the results and treating them with appropriate statistical means, the researcher reached several conclusions, the most important of which is the test designed to measure the accuracy of correction and its bearing with a basketball on a wheelchair, and it takes the implementation of the test Approximately (5) minutes, taking into account giving the laboratory (5) minutes to warm up and perform some corrections before the actual implementation of the test. In addition, the test highlights the strengths and weaknesses of wheelchair basketball players in terms of their ability to shoot from distances, as well as withstand performance, and in light of these conclusions the researcher recommended several recommendations, including an emphasis on using the designed test as an aid in assessing the The correction skill of wheelchair basketball players, as well as the use of the test as a means of training players in the skill of shooting basketball on wheelchairs, as well as applying this test to other samples of basketball players and players taking into account the common type of correction for such samples.

Accountability in times of exception: an exploratory study of account-giving practices during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the role of accountability in times of exception. The Italian government's account-giving practices are critically analysed with respect to the distinct modes in which duties of accountability are discharged for the exceptional measures taken during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020.Design/methodology/approachThis paper draws on an exploratory case study. The case analysis draws primarily on data obtained through publicly available documents and covers the period between January 1 and August 7, 2020.FindingsThe paper reveals that the Italian government employed various accountability styles (rebuttal, dismissal, reactive, proactive and coactive). Each style influenced both how the government justified its conduct and how it sought to form distinctive relationships with social actors.Originality/valueThe paper uses the notion of “styles of accountability” to empirically illustrate how an unprecedented public governance challenge can reveal broader accountability trends. The paper contributes to accountability research by elucidating how governments tackle ambiguity and uncertainty in their systems of public accountability in extraordinary times.

Social Accountability Between Consensus and Confrontation: Developing a Theoretical Framework for Societal Accountability Relationships of Public Sector Organizations

Numerous politicians and scholars have argued that accountability of public authorities to citizens, clients, and societal actors is needed in the current age of governance. Academic debates about social accountability are however scattered with incompatible conceptualizations, high normative expectations, and sobering findings. This article develops an in-depth framework that provides a comprehensive definition and typology of social accountability. It discusses major empirical challenges to social accountability and multiple behavioral styles within social accountability. By distinguishing consensual and confrontational styles of account-holding and account-giving, this article shows that social accountability could serve multiple purposes that go beyond rosy ideals.

The escalation of an armed conflict: a look at the antecedents of the confrontation between the Colombian state and the FARC

With one of the longest-running conflicts in the Western Hemisphere, the Colombian state has been facing an internal armed conflict against the FARC since the 1950s. Four milestones set the framework for the most important background in this conflict. The first one, with the murder of leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, unleashed acts of severe violence between liberals and conservatives; then, the second milestone was due to the creation of the “national front” that ended the disputes by rotating power between these political parties; however, other minority groups were not taken into account, giving rise to the third milestone, where the FARC guerrillas emerged by claiming a communist model, and the fourth milestone corresponds to heavy military strikes against this guerrilla group that forced the FARC to a negotiate peace accord. Considering the theory of escalation and stagnation of the armed conflict, this article aims at summarizing the background that has led to this conflict, which had its beginnings in political disputes but gradually escalated to become a serious problem that the country has been suffering.

Feminist Democratic Representation

When are women well represented, politically speaking? The popular consensus has been, for some time, when descriptive representatives put women’s issues and feminist interests on the political agenda. Today, such certainty has been well and truly shaken; differences among women—especially how they conceive of their “interests”—is said to fatally undermine the principle and practice of women’s group representation. There has been a serious loss of faith, too, in legislatures as the sites where political representation takes place. Feminist Democratic Representation responds by making a second-generation feminist design intervention; firmly grounded in feminist empirical political science, the authors’ design shows how women’s misrepresentation is best met procedurally, taking women’s differences as their starting point, adopting an indivisible conception of representation, and reclaiming the role of legislatures. This book introduces a new group of actors—the affected representatives of women—and two new parliamentary practices: group advocacy and account giving. Working with a series of vignettes—abortion, prostitution, Muslim women’s dress, and Marine Le Pen—the authors explore how these representational problematics might fare were a feminist democratic process of representation in place. The ideal representative effects are broad rather than simply descriptive or substantive: they include effects relating to affinity, trust, legitimacy, symbolism, and affect. They manifest in stronger representative relationships among women in society, and between women and their representatives, elected and affective; and greater support for the procedures, institutions, and substantive outputs of representative politics, and at a higher level, the idea of representative democracy. Against the more fashionable tide of post-representative politics, Feminist Democratic Representation argues for more and better representation.

Affected Representatives, Group Advocacy, and Account Giving

Chapter 5 introduces a new category of political actors—the affected representatives of women—and discusses the key features of twin institutional augmentations, group advocacy and account giving. The affected representatives connect women to the formal representation process, establish new representative relations, and, importantly, generate a new context for deliberation by elected representatives on women’s issues. Affected representatives advocate for differently affected groups of women and hold elected representatives to account for their parliamentary deliberations and decisions. The standard according to which elected representatives will be publicly judged is reaching just and fair decisions for all women. Designed in this way, women’s group representation is better able to address women’s ideological and intersectional differences and tackle women’s inequality vis-à-vis men and within-group processes of privileging and marginalization. It is a much more solid answer to women’s failing representation compared with an overreliance on women’s descriptive representation and gender quota, the key first-generation design.

Introduction

Chapter 1 makes a defense of representative democracy even as it acknowledges long-standing and contemporary feminist criticism and surveys the appeal of more fashionable non-representative alternatives. As part of this, the authors consider the failure of political parties to “do good by women.” Adopting a problem-based approach, they remake the case for women’s group representation, reviewing the 1990s politics-of-presence literature in light of criticism based on women’s ideological and intersectional differences. Instead of regarding this as undermining the possibility of women’s group representation, the authors hold that these differences should become central to its successful realization. A second observation is the tendency of gender and politics scholars to disaggregate the concept of representation. Eschewing this approach, they instead hold that political representation is better understood as indivisible: a mélange of its many, overlapping, and connected dimensions. The final section of Chapter 1 introduces the structure and component parts of the book’s argument, introducing the reader to the “affected representatives of women,” and the authors’ twin augmentations, group advocacy and account giving.