About the book
The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability provides a state of the art overview of recent scholarship on public accountability. It collects, consolidates, and integrates an upsurge of inquiry currently scattered across many disciplines and sub-disciplines. It provides a one-stop-shop on the subject, not only for academics who study accountability, but also for practitioners who are designing, adjusting, or struggling with mechanisms for accountable governance.
Accountability and Ambiguity
Olsens main argument in his chapter 'Accountability and Ambiguity' is that mainstream accountability theory reduces its own area by not taking ambiguity seriously enough. Theorizing accountability, he states, requires "going beyond the dominant concern in the literature organized around compliance and control: to detect and measure deviance from authoritative orders, rules, standards and contracts; to discipline unruly agents and make them comply, thereby solving the problems of the principals".
Full info
Johan P. Olsen
'Accountability and Ambiguity'
In: The Oxford Handbook of Public Accountability, Mark Bovens, Robert E. Goodin and Thomas Schillemans (eds).
Oxford University Press, 2014.
ISBN: 978-0-19-964125-3