Abstract
This paper explores how various accountability demands are addressed in interactions between a privately-owned supplier of outsourced elderly care and the local government administration that finances these services. We find a dynamic and situation-specific attribution of accountor and constituent roles, in contrast to prior research’s routine consideration of these roles as being predetermined by existing relationships of hierarchy and influence. We also propose the concept of role attribution to characterize this strategy for handling complexity in public sector accountability processes. This finding complements previous research, which has described three main strategies for handling competing accountability demands: decoupling, structural differentiation and compromising. Role attribution differs from these strategies, which focus mainly on accountor’s actions to handle multiple constituents. In contrast, role attribution was found to involve the supplier and purchaser of public services pursuing a specific resolution to an accountability demand by positioning themselves as jointly aligned with certain prospective constituents in the environment. Role attribution highlights that an accountor-constituent pair can cooperate to deal with shared accountabilities and operational interdependencies in relation to common prospective constituents. Thus, while inter-organisational relationships can be a source of complexity for accountors, as already documented in prior research, our findings show ways in which the dynamic and situation-specific accountor and constituent roles can serve as a resource. The two organizations moved back and forth between cooperating to handle accountability demands from actors in the environment, and assuming different accountor and constituent roles within their relationship.