Dick, P. and Coule, T. (2020) Non-Conformance with Regulatory Codes in the Non-Profit Sector: Accountability and the Discursive Coupling of Means and Ends. Business & Society, 50 (4). pp. 749-786. ISSN 0007-6503
Abstract
Means-ends decoupling has recently been suggested as one consequence of the problems organizations face in trying to comply with institutional rules in contexts of institutional complexity. Such decoupling is characterized by the adoption, implementation and scrutiny of particular codes of practice, which tend not to deliver the outcomes they were developed to produce. Recent scholarship focusing on this issue has suggested that such decoupling is a consequence of the trade-off organizations need to make between compliance and goal achievement most especially when the latter is difficult to evaluate. While recent scholarship has suggested that this tension might be mitigated by the activities of developers of compliance rules, in this article, we explore how actors internal to organizations, in this case, two charitable organizations, mitigate this tension via non-conformance with particular codes. We focus on how the process of accounting for non-conformance results in the discursive coupling of means and ends as actors creatively develop vocabularies of motive, which respond to anticipated social criticism.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Business and Society. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | accountability; decoupling; discourse; justification; means–ends decoupling; nonprofit governance; vocabularies of motive |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Management School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 26 Feb 2018 14:52 |
Last Modified: | 20 Apr 2021 10:58 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/0007650317748638 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:127841 |