3. Research agenda
In this section we seek to understand and classify the nature ofthe research undertaken in respect of Public Sector Reforms and new hybrid organisational forms, in particular PPPs. In the wake of NPM we have experienced a “marketisation” of the public sector and with that an increase in the number of hybrid organisations that combine the features from public and private sector organisations (Grossi & Thomasson, 2015). All these hybrid organizational solutions (e.g., purchaser-provider models, contracting out, outsourcing, corporatization, public and private partnerships, etc.) create a completely new set of problems for accounting and accountability systems (e.g., who should be accountable for what, how we compare the level of performance of public and private sector units in service provision, how we cope with the transparency and “publicness” of performance information in the context of state-owned enterprises) (Peters & Pierre, 1998). Accounting and accountability systems are reshaped and revised by the evolving context of public sector organizations, where not only does the “private” invade the “public,” but the “public” invades the “private.” (Grossi, Hansen, Johanson, Jae Moon, & Vakkuri, 2016). We aim to explore the role accounting and accountability play in the growth of these types of organisations in order to identify where research is undertaken and where there are gaps in the field. We also seek to provide agendas and directions for more research in the field and for consideration of particular types of research, considering the culture of these organisations and the complexity of accounting and accountability reforms.
