What is it about?
It is a chapter in an encycopedia on public administration issues. It presents the ‘Contingency Model’, which explains reforms in governmental accounting and financial management systems, resorting to several factors making part of the contextual conditions of those reforms. Aslo used in an a posteriori perspective, it essentially posits an a priori setting, where several factors combine more or less favorably to determine the likelihood of reforms to come to happen. In particular, the model allows to frame the more or less favourable combination of contextual conditions within one country, to conduct the so-called traditional governmental accounting system to change towards performance and resource accounting and budgeting.
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Why is it important?
It addresses one of the most important theoretical models developed to frame govermntal accounting reforms in the last decades – the Contingency/FMR Model, also known as Lüder’s Model. After an introductory section about the origins of the Contingency Theory, it focus on explaining how it was adopted to public sector accounting reforms, then detailing the Contingency Model since its first version up to the most recent one – the Financial Management Reform (FRM) process model. At the end, some concluding remarks are presented.
Perspectives
The model's main underlying assumption is that specific contextual variables determine the primary user orientation of governmental accounting and reporting, which, in turn, determines the design of the governmental accounting and reporting system. It is not a causal relation though, but a conductive one instead, as we will explain later. The model addresses a comparative-international perspective.
Dr Susana Jorge
University of Coimbra
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contingency Model of Reforms in Public Sector Accounting, January 2016, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_2295-1.
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