on the entities that populate a domain, and paying greater
attention to the linkages between them, and particularly
the instruments that act as intermediaries by connecting
actors, agencies and aspirations. For it is through these,
and particularly through the management control practices
deployed, that a working ensemble can be formed out of all
the components and practices that make up the increasingly
complex sphere of public service provision. Rather
than viewing management control practices as simply the
‘implementation’ of policy, they are viewed as interdefined
with the political, professional and organizational categories
that animate them.
We suggest that this focus indicates the need to broaden
the study of inter-organizational relations and management
control to include not only organizational forms, but
the practices and processes through which they are made
operable (Miller et al., 2008). These may be formalised, as
in the ‘notifications’ required for all partnership proposals
submitted as part of the Health Act 1999, including
governance arrangements, specification of functions to be
included, complaints procedures and dispute resolution
mechanisms. But they may also be relatively localised,
such as the County Wide Assessment Team devised in one
site, or the forms produced for the recording of costs and
inputs. We suggest that greater attention to these ‘mediating
instruments’ can help us to understand better how
local practitioners combine the imperatives of continued
and even enhanced service delivery with the injunction to
adhere to new regulatory reforms or legal categories. For
it is in such settings that management control practices in
the public sector are increasingly having to operate: at the
intersection of highly abstract reform processes couched
in the language of cooperation, professional boundaries
that can be very strongly defined, and management control
practices that have to enable information exchanges and
modes of reporting that respect administrative boundaries
while seeking to attenuate them.
Our fieldwork reported in Section 4 demonstrated how
cooperation can exist and even flourish at a local level,
albeit within certain parameters, how it can develop
more pragmatically as a way of ‘mediating’ between the
expectations of reformers and the immediate needs of
service delivery, and how it can encounter rather more
fundamental limits as a result of strongly defined professional
enclosures. This suggests that future research
should pay more attention to the ways in which management
control practices in the field of public administration
encounter inter-professional boundaries and enclosures,
and the implications this has for developing still further
inter-organizational cooperation and control practices.
Our fieldwork suggests also that greater attention
should be paid to the rather more modest ‘mediating
instruments’ that emerge and are formed within such
processes, for it is through these that the discursive
aspirations of policy makers are brought into contact
with the organizational and professional boundaries that
characterise domains such as healthcare and social care.
Inter-organizational management controls act, as it were,
as an intermediary in the interplay between public administration
and professional enclosures. This is consistent
with what has been noted in the very different setting
of the microprocessor industry with respect to ‘roadmapping
practices’ (Miller and O’Leary, 2007), which have been
viewed similarly as instruments of mediation. There, a
dense network of information exchanges across organizational
boundaries has developed over a period of several
decades, resulting in a large amount of information sharing
that one would not normally expect in competitive
situations. Accounting researchers, together with organization
scholars, sociologists and economists, have to
date paid relatively little attention to such information
exchanges, focussing instead more on the entities that
populate the socio-economic world, rather than the instruments
and processes that link them. The analogy with
the microprocessor industry is that cooperation can be
enhanced through the creation of settings in which information
can be exchanged, formally separate administrative
or professional groups can meet, and instruments can be
devised that provide visibility to the norms and expectations
of different parties. This allows the assessment of
instruments, policies and time-lines, together with negotiation
over their alignment. While we did not observe
in our research major steps being taken towards the formal
pooling of budgets, or the creation of new integrated
entities, we did observe novel working and management
control practices that spanned organizational and professional
boundaries. We suggest that greater attention
should be paid to these apparently more modest steps, and
the practices or instruments that facilitate them, for these
can help us understand better what may b