Organisations are constantly called on to justify their actions to internal and external constituents. What happens if these constituents have divergent or conflicting opinions of what constitutes misconduct? This thesis uses the case of accountability for publicly financed elderly care performed by private providers to explore this question. The study demonstrates how accountability can be conceptualized as an ongoing process concerned with answering two questions: what constitutes satisfactory or unsatisfactory conducts, and who is accountable to whom? Both the private care providers and the municipal regions that finance them make continuous efforts to shape the answers to these questions by drawing on different forms of accounting information, norms, and influence in the course of their accountability processes. These local processes are affected by and interact with a surrounding network of direct and indirect accountability relationships between national supervision agencies, the media, elderly care clients, clients’ families, and the care providers’ and regions’ own hierarchies. The study argues that the dilemmas created by this network mean that care providers and regions are on the one hand trying to influence their mutual accountability processes to their own advantage, while on the other working as one unit to navigate overlapping areas of accountability, mutual dependency, and the unpredictability of external demands. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Stockholm School of Economics, 2014</p>

Improving product development is a complex task for many companies. One challenge is to avoid over-engineering and only include the functionality that customers are willing to pay for. Another challenge is to reduce costs in close co-operation with suppliers. This is a complex task because suppliers often have their own goals and are rarely located at the same physical place. Handling these two challenges is the domain of target costing. Emerging first from Japanese companies such as Toyota, Nissan and Olympus, target costing has become a critical element in achieving long-term profitability. Previous research on target costing has been paradoxical because even though it deals with product development, it has not incorporated the complexity of the product development process. More specifically, current models of target costing assume that the product development process can largely be planned and controlled by a single company. For complex multi-technology products, such as airplanes and industrial robots, this is far from true. By drawing on product development theories, and conducting an in-depth case study at ABB Robotics, this thesis explores target costing in the development of complex multi-technology products. The result is a framework that identifies challenges and problems in target costing processes, but also shows that target costing relies on both planning and improvisation to cope with tensions and contradictions in close customer and supplier relationships. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, 2011