Assessing budgetary management of local government in Aceh, Indonesia

<p>This interpretive case-based study explores issues of budgetary management in Aceh provincial government. Until 2018, Aceh showed significant problems in its budget cycle with the budget being approved late every year except 2014. Thus, this study aims to investigate the reasons for these delays, along with their impacts on budget execution. Further, as Aceh is a predominantly Muslim society with Islamic values and principles fundamental to its culture and identity, this study also explores whether Islamic teachings are well-embedded in its government budgeting. To investigate these issues, I gathered written materials related to the budgeting process and conducted 19 interviews with local government officials, politicians, Muslim scholars, and a corruption watchdog, analysing these through three linked accountability frameworks: considering accountability through relationship, responsibility, and answerability dimensions, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1999) Sociology of Worth (SoW) framework, and Islamic accountability. I found the key reasons for the budget delays were miscommunications and heated debates in budget discussions between Aceh’s legislature and executive government resulting from conflicts of interest and priorities. The budget delays negatively affected budget execution, which, since Aceh’s economy depends heavily on government spending, reduced economic activity and so the social welfare of its people. Given the problems in its budgetary management, including budget delays, conflicting interests, and lack of transparency, the implementation of Islamic principles and values in Aceh’s government budgeting remains unsatisfactory. This study offers several contributions to the literature and practice: (i) it generates new ideas for the classification of SoW’s orders of worth when applied to public budgeting and accountability in a devout Muslim society; (ii) it outlines some challenges in implementing Islamic principles and values into government budgeting; and (iii) it notes some potential improvements for Aceh provincial government to achieve better budgetary management and accountability.</p>

Assessing budgetary management of local government in Aceh, Indonesia

<p>This interpretive case-based study explores issues of budgetary management in Aceh provincial government. Until 2018, Aceh showed significant problems in its budget cycle with the budget being approved late every year except 2014. Thus, this study aims to investigate the reasons for these delays, along with their impacts on budget execution. Further, as Aceh is a predominantly Muslim society with Islamic values and principles fundamental to its culture and identity, this study also explores whether Islamic teachings are well-embedded in its government budgeting. To investigate these issues, I gathered written materials related to the budgeting process and conducted 19 interviews with local government officials, politicians, Muslim scholars, and a corruption watchdog, analysing these through three linked accountability frameworks: considering accountability through relationship, responsibility, and answerability dimensions, Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1999) Sociology of Worth (SoW) framework, and Islamic accountability. I found the key reasons for the budget delays were miscommunications and heated debates in budget discussions between Aceh’s legislature and executive government resulting from conflicts of interest and priorities. The budget delays negatively affected budget execution, which, since Aceh’s economy depends heavily on government spending, reduced economic activity and so the social welfare of its people. Given the problems in its budgetary management, including budget delays, conflicting interests, and lack of transparency, the implementation of Islamic principles and values in Aceh’s government budgeting remains unsatisfactory. This study offers several contributions to the literature and practice: (i) it generates new ideas for the classification of SoW’s orders of worth when applied to public budgeting and accountability in a devout Muslim society; (ii) it outlines some challenges in implementing Islamic principles and values into government budgeting; and (iii) it notes some potential improvements for Aceh provincial government to achieve better budgetary management and accountability.</p>

The participatory turn in health and medicine: The rise of the civic and the need to ‘give back’ in data-intensive medical research

What has been called the “participatory turn” in health and medicine refers to a general shift from paternalistic and hierarchical, to more collaborative and egalitarian relationships between medical experts and patients/research participants; a shift from what the pragmatic sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) call a “domestic” to a “civic” order of worth. Critical scholarship on the participatory turn tends to emphasize discrepancies between ideals of equality and empowerment, and practices of increased individual responsibility and disempowerment. In this paper, we depart from this critical literature by suspending evaluation about authentic and inauthentic ideals and practices. Instead, we explore the issues and challenges that arise in the process of ensuring that ideal and practice align in what we call a civic-participatory style of doing medical research. Drawing on interviews and observations carried out with medical researchers, coordinators and assessors in a longitudinal cohort study called the Personalized Parkinson’s Project (PPP), we show that for study staff it is often unclear how they can meet the demands of reciprocity towards research participants that are presupposed by civic-participatory ideals. In particular, in the context of a study whose aim is the creation of a comprehensive dataset comprised of clinical, environmental and lifestyle data that study participants generously “give” over a period of 2 years, we observed a persistent concern on the part of study staff regarding what and how to “give back”. As we show, study staff negotiate and resolve this tension through recourse to creative workarounds and innovative ways of giving back, including frequent project and scientific updates, newsletters, the designation of personal assessors and pampering Event Days. The paper makes a contribution to the critical literature on the participatory turn by showing the utility of the orders of worth framework in probing the challenges and workarounds that emerge in settings where an incumbent style of organizing medical research (here, the 'civic') comes to challenge practices hitherto organized according to a wholly different logic (in this case, the 'domestic')—without making assumptions about the (in)authenticity of such ideals and practices. Moreover, we contend that this framework offers new tools for evaluating participatory research projects in the form of “good” or “successful” civic–domestic compromises.

Committed capitalism

This article presents contributions from pragmatic sociology to the debate on the commitment of economic actors to socio-environmental causes. Given the controversy about the achievements of their engagement, we propose the notion of committed capitalism and seek to understand it through the moral ground of its critiques, defenses and the construction of its normativity. We aim to emphasize two dimensions observed in contemporary capitalism: the declared commitment to a cause and the efforts of actors to stabilize a compromise among distinct orders of worth (market, industrial, and civic) and create devices that actualize it in the world. Drawing on a textual corpus of Brazilian newspapers, we examine the interplay of critiques of corporate social responsibility, corporate sustainability, and social finance, as well as their responses. As a result, we present a framework of internal and external critiques of the compromise that allow us to understand the contours of the moral dimension that underpins some crucial aspects of contemporary capitalism.

Who is a good journalist? Evaluations of journalistic worth in the era of social media

In this article, I enquire into the ways that journalists understand their identities and values now that social media dominate the routines of networked newsrooms. My approach is grounded on a Discourse Theory framework within which journalism emerges as a symbolic practice constituted through the discourse of its practitioners. Drawing additionally on pragmatic sociology, I understand journalists as reflexive practitioners who discursively attribute value to various orders of worth in order to evaluate their own identities. Taking the British news organisation The Guardian as my case study, my analysis of 10 newsroom interviews demonstrates how journalists develop a series of evaluations in order to identify themselves. My findings confirm a shift in the ways that journalists evaluate themselves, which is today associated with a new valorisation of networking. This shift towards networking, however, does not destroy long-standing journalistic values. It is ultimately their institutional identities that journalists re-invent through social media, and it is according to their institutional expertise that they evaluate themselves as professionals. In conclusion, I argue that, whilst journalists reaffirm their disdain for the financial rewards of the market, by embracing social media networking they expose themselves to the influence of capitalist markets.