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>

Starting from the standpoint of antiracist feminists in Southern Ontario, Canada, I examine the everyday social organization of antiracist feminist activism. Using key concepts from institutional ethnography and other critical research methods, I explore how women of colour activists engage, contest and modify existing social relations within women’s organizations to craft antiracist feminist organizational change. I describe how women of colour negotiate their antiracist, feminist and social justice commitments in ways which both respond to, and are constitutive of, contradictory social relations within women’s organizations. An analysis of in-depth interviews with women of colour activists reveals dialectic processes of accountability in their everyday antiracist feminist practice. Activists are accountable, on the one hand, to hierarchical relations within the daily practices of women’s organizations, and, on the other hand, to other feminist, antiracist and social justice activists. I describe how relations of accountability, named respectively, organizational accountability and activist responsibility, socially organize women of colour’s everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism. In particular, I argue that organizational accountability must be understood as relations of hierarchical answerability within the organization that extend outside the organization, while activist responsibility needs to be seen as the relations by which activists become accountable to other activists in the enactment of an explicitly antiracist feminist praxis. I describe further how women of colour creatively and consciously do antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing and negotiating both sets of relations of accountability to develop antiracist feminist social and organizational change. I highlight the importance of everyday activist work by revealing the ways women of colour seize the potential for crafting antiracist feminist change through relations of accountability. Significantly, this study offers a conceptualization of everyday antiracist feminist activist practice as a negotiation of relations of accountability.

Starting from the standpoint of antiracist feminists in Southern Ontario, Canada, I examine the everyday social organization of antiracist feminist activism. Using key concepts from institutional ethnography and other critical research methods, I explore how women of colour activists engage, contest and modify existing social relations within women’s organizations to craft antiracist feminist organizational change. I describe how women of colour negotiate their antiracist, feminist and social justice commitments in ways which both respond to, and are constitutive of, contradictory social relations within women’s organizations. An analysis of in-depth interviews with women of colour activists reveals dialectic processes of accountability in their everyday antiracist feminist practice. Activists are accountable, on the one hand, to hierarchical relations within the daily practices of women’s organizations, and, on the other hand, to other feminist, antiracist and social justice activists. I describe how relations of accountability, named respectively, organizational accountability and activist responsibility, socially organize women of colour’s everyday experience of antiracist feminist activism. In particular, I argue that organizational accountability must be understood as relations of hierarchical answerability within the organization that extend outside the organization, while activist responsibility needs to be seen as the relations by which activists become accountable to other activists in the enactment of an explicitly antiracist feminist praxis. I describe further how women of colour creatively and consciously do antiracist feminist activism by mobilizing and negotiating both sets of relations of accountability to develop antiracist feminist social and organizational change. I highlight the importance of everyday activist work by revealing the ways women of colour seize the potential for crafting antiracist feminist change through relations of accountability. Significantly, this study offers a conceptualization of everyday antiracist feminist activist practice as a negotiation of relations of accountability.