Over the last two decades, the publ

Over the last two decades, the public sector has been the
subject of a thorough reassessment in a significant number
of countries. During this period, the introduction of new programmes, policies and reforms, as well as the resulting
implementation of innovative practices, processes and
techniques have often been “branded” by the term New
Public Management (Hood, 1995, 1998). The agenda of New
Public Management embraces reforms aimed at improving
the quality of public services, reducing public expenditure,
increasing the efficiency of governmental operations,
and making policy implementation more effective, to name
a few (Hughes, 2003; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2000). The
rhetoric of New Public Management emphasizes the need
to modernize the public sector by abandoning traditional
public management styles and professional bureaucracies
and, instead, promoting concepts such as accountability,
performance, networking, efficiency, and effectiveness
as the core elements in managing public organizations.
Within this ongoing, but fragmentary, process of modernizing
of the public sector, issues such as inter-organizational
collaboration and managerial innovation have been progressively
placed at the forefront of practice and research
(see, among others, Mahony et al., 2010; Kurunmäki and
Miller, 2006).
Between the mid 1980s and the late 1990s, in many
countries the idea prevailed that competition between
public organizations (as well as between public and private
organizations) could guarantee the more efficient
use of resources on the one hand and, on the other,
the opportunity for the citizen-user to choose between
several providers according to the quality of the service
offered. For example, in several countries the reform of
public healthcare systems was characterized by the need
to enhance competition among service providers (Lapsley,
1993). However, it was soon realized that new models of
governance did not necessarily lead to improved effectiveness
and efficiency. Significantly, greater competition
among service providers caused various problems, including
irrational economic behaviors, and prevented any
form of inter-organizational cooperation (Ellwood, 1996;
Pettersen, 1999). For these reasons, a number of countries
have recently re-organized their public sector around more
or less formalized networks, or hybrid inter-organizational
forms, which are often led by a regulatory body and governed
by a cooperation agreement (see, among the others,
Barretta, 2008; Kurunmäki and Miller, 2006).
The literature on inter-organizational relationships in
the public sector has evolved alongside the development
of these cooperation agreements and innovative forms of
organizing (Samuel et al., 2009; Broadbent and Guthrie,
2008; Moll and Humphrey, 2007). Numerous issues have
been debated, including the factors that induce organizations
to cooperate, the reasons for the success (or failure)
of partnerships, the structure and strategies of cooperation
agreements, and the role of trust in networks. Despite
the fact that networks formed by public organizations,
not-for-profit organizations, and private firms provide
important services for their relevant communities, limited
attention has been dedicated to studying the role of
management control practices in inter-organizational relationships
involving public organizations (see Brignall and
Modell, 2000; Clarke and Lapsley, 2004; Kurunmäki, 2004;
Lapsley and Wright, 2004; Miller et al., 2008; Modell et al.,
2007). We believe this is an important gap in the existing
literature, which this Special Issue of Management Accounting
Research intends to start addressing.