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Accountability is a concept in ethics with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as answerability, enforcement, responsibility, blameworthiness, liability and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving. As an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in both the public and private (corporation) worlds. Ethics (via Latin from the Ancient Greek moral philosophy, from the adjective of Ä“thos custom, habit), a major branch of philosophy, is the study of values and customs of a person or group. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
In the most general sense, a liability is anything that is a hindrance, or puts individuals at a disadvantage. ...
“Corporate†redirects here. ...
Accountability is defined as "A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A’s (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, and to suffer punishment in the case of eventual misconduct" [1].
In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, explain and be answerable for resulting consequences. Look up Administration (business) in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
History
"Accountability" stems from late Latin accomptare (to account), a prefixed form of computare (to calculate), which in turn derived from putare (to reckon).[2] The word is an extension of the terminology used in the money lending systems that first developed in Ancient Greece and later, Rome.[citation needed] One would borrow money from a money lender, be that a local Temple or Merchant, and would then be held responsible to their account with that party. Responsibility is also a close synonym. Perhaps the first written statement of accountability is in the Code of Hammurabi, Hammurabi describes certain undesirable actions and their consequences. One example: Terminology is the study of terms and their use — of words and compound words that are used in specific contexts. ...
Ancient Greece is a period in Greek history that lasted for around nine hundred years. ...
Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew from a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula circa the 9th century BC to a massive empire straddling the Mediterranean Sea. ...
Temple of Hephaestus, an Doric Greek temple in Athens with the original entrance facing east, 449 BC (western face depicted) For other uses, see Temple (disambiguation). ...
Synonyms (in ancient Greek, συν (syn) = plus and όνομα (onoma) = name) are different words with similar or identical meanings. ...
An inscription of the Code of Hammurabi The Code of Hammurabi (also known as the Codex Hammurabi and Hammurabis Code), created ca. ...
This diorite head is believed to represent Hammurabi Hammurabi (Akkadian from Amorite ˤAmmurÄpi, the kinsman is a healer, from ˤAmmu, paternal kinsman, and RÄpi, healer; 1810 BC?–1750 BC) also rarely transliterated Ammurapi, Hammurapi, or Khammurabi) was the sixth king of Babylon. ...
- "If a man uses violence on another man's wife to sleep with her, the man shall be killed, but the wife shall be blameless."
Other early examples can be found in the Bible and the Quaran. This Gutenberg Bible is displayed by the United States Library. ...
The Qur’Än [1] (Arabic: ;, literally the recitation; also sometimes transliterated as Quran, Koran, or Alcoran) is the central religious text of Islam. ...
Types of accountability Bruce Stone, O.P. Dwivedi, and Joseph G. Jabbra list 8 types of accountability, namely: moral, administrative, political, managerial, market, legal/judicial, constituency relation, and professional.
Political Accountability The case in which the Congress, or the legislature, holds other civil servant accountable is part of political accountability. Mechanisms of political accountability are vested in constitution, either written or unwritten, or statute and implemented in three dimensions: election, legislature and ministerial.
Election is the most direct way for accountability, and is a way for enforcement. An election gives a chance for the proposed cabinet and proposed legislators to run for campaigns and attend forums so as to explain and inform their purposes and goals if they are elected. On the other hand, it is also a sanction for those who misbehaved or failed to act as a representative for one’s field in the past tenure – by giving the vote to someone else.
Constitution or equivalents also empowers legislature to hold civil servants accountable. Firstly, legislature may invite public servants for inquiry sessions to explain explicitly planning or policies made, or to unfold any misappropriates. Further, legislature can organize an investigation committee for particular issue by inviting outsiders as committees. Abovementioned are mechanisms aiming to compel civil servants in to dialogue and hence, gives answerability. It can introduce motions for impeachment and no-confidence in case for misbehavior or misconduct.
Ministers, as conceived as the top of the hierarchy of the ministry, are supposed to hold accountable for every affairs in the ministry; as all civil servant within are merely cogs and wigs and operate in the light of the ministers’ vision. However, ministerial accountability is vague in parliamentary system. The parliamentary have to constitute the cabinet to executive the government, yet, holding the executives accountable as abovementioned.
Administrative Accountability Internal rules and norms as well as some independent commission are mechanisms to hold civil servant within the administration of government accountable. Within department or ministry, firstly, behavior is bounded by rules and regulations; secondly, civil servants are subordinates in a hierarchy and accountable to superiors. Nonetheless, there are independent “watchdog” units to scrutinize and hold departments accountable; legitimacy of these commissions is built upon their independence, as it avoids any conflicts of interest. Apart from internal checks, some “watchdog” units accept complaints from citizens, bridging government and society to hold civil servants accountable to citizens, but not merely governmental departments.
Judicial/legal accountability Court action and judicial review are two mechanisms by which the public may address violations of law and constitution. Moreover, court actions also fill the gap between accountability between executive and legislature; if the executive fail or reluctant to exercise legitimate decision made by legislature, or vice versa, one can appeal through the court and the tribunal base on constitution or equivalents.
Professional accountability Professional public servants, namely lawyers, doctors, engineers, and accountants, are also bound by professional codes and norms established in the light of public interest [3]. Professionals are obliged to join correspondent professional societies and take oaths to be licensed.
Market Accountability Under voices for decentralization and privatization of the government, services provided are nowadays more “customer-driven” and should aim to provide convenience and various choices to citizens; with this perspective, there are comparisons and competition between public and private services and this, ideally, improves quality of service. As mentioned by Bruce Stone, the standard of assessment for accountability is therefore “responsiveness of service providers to a body of ‘sovereign’ customers and produce quality service. Outsourcing service is one means to adopt market accountability. Government can choose among a shortlist of companies for outsourced service; within the contracting period, government can hold the company by rewriting contracts or by choosing another company.
Constituency Relations With this perspective, whether a particular agency or the government is being accountable depends on whether voices from agencies, groups or institutions, which is outside the public sector and representing citizens’ interests in a particular constituency or field, are heard. Moreover, the government is obliged to empower members of agencies with political rights to run for elections and be elected; or, appoint them into the public sector as a way to hold the government representative and ensure voices from all constituencies are included in policy-making process.
Social Implications In politics, and particularly in representative democracies, accountability is an important factor in securing legitimacy of public power. Accountability differs from transparency in that it only enables negative feedback after a decision or action, while transparency also enables negative feedback before or during a decision or action. Accountability constrains the extent to which elected representatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from their theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. The relationship of the concept of accountability to related concepts like the rule of law or democracy, however, still awaits further elucidation. The Politics series Politics Portal This box: Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. ...
Representative democracy is a form of government founded on the principles of popular sovereignty by the peoples representatives. ...
The word legitimacy comes from the Latin word legitimare and it has two uses: Legitimacy (political science) is variously defined, but refers in general to the peoples acceptance of a law, ruling, or a regime itself as valid. ...
In the physical sciences, specifically in optics, a transparent physical object is one that can be seen through. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
The rule of law is the principle that governmental authority is legitimately exercised only in accordance with written, publicly disclosed laws adopted and enforced in accordance with established procedure. ...
Contemporary Evolution Accountability involves either the expectation or assumption of account-giving behavior. The study of account giving as a sociological act was recently articulated in a 1968 article on "Accounts" by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman and Stephen Soroka [4], although it can be traced as well to J.L. Austin's 1956 essay "A Plea for Excuses," [5] in which he used excuse-making as an example of speech acts. John Langshaw Austin (March 28, 1911 - February 8, 1960) was a philosopher of language, who developed much of the current theory of speech acts. ...
The speech act is a concept in linguistics and the philosophy of language. ...
Communications scholars have extended this work through the examination of strategic uses of excuses, justifications, rationalizations, apologies and other forms of account giving behavior by individuals and corporations, and Philip Tetlock and his colleagues have applied experimental design techniques to explore how individuals behave under various scenarios and situations that demand accountability.
In Britain, accountability has been formally identified by Government since 1995 as one of the Seven Principles of Public Life[6]: "Holders of public office are accountable for their decisions and actions to the public and must submit themselves to whatever scrutiny is appropriate to their office." The goal of accountability is at times in tension with the goal of leadership. A constituency may have short-term desires which are at odds with long-term interests. It has also been argued that accountability provides in certain situations an escape route for ministers to avoid the consequences of ministerial responsibility, which would require resignation.[7] In the Westminster System ministerial responsibility is the notion that a cabinet minister bears the ultimate responsibility for the actions of their ministry. ...
Recently, accountability has become an important topos in the discussion about the legitimacy of international institutions. [8] Because there is no global democracy to which organizations must account, global administrative bodies are often criticized as having large accountability gaps. One paradigmatic problem arising in the global context is that of institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF who are founded and supported by wealthy nations and provide aid, in the form of grants and loans, to developing nations. Should those institutions be accountable to their founders and investors or to the persons and nations they help? In the debate over global justice and its distributional consequences, Cosmopolitans tend to advocate greater accountability to the disregarded interests of traditionally marginalized populations and developing nations. On the other hand, those in the Nationalism and Society of States traditions deny the tenets of moral universalism and argue that beneficiaries of global development initiatives have no substantive entitlement to call international institutions to account. ...
The flag of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the international organization entrusted with overseeing the global financial system by monitoring foreign exchange rates and balance of payments, as well as offering technical and financial assistance when asked. ...
Global justice is a concept in political philosophy denoting justice between societies or between individuals in different societies, as opposed to within a specific society. ...
Eugène Delacroixs Liberty Leading the People, symbolising French nationalism during the July Revolution 1830. ...
Moral universalism is a moral view, often related to humanist philosophy, which claims that the fundamental basis for a universalist ethic—universally applicable to all humanity—can be derived or inferred from what is common among existing moral codes. ...
Accountability is becoming an increasingly important issue for the non-profit world. Several NGOs signed the "accountability charter" in 2005. In the Humanitarian field, initiatives such as the HAPI (Humanitarian Accountability Partnership International) appeared. Individual NGOs have set their own accountability systems (for example, the ALPS, Accountability, Learning and Planning System of ActionAid)
See also Political campaign Part of the Politics series Politics Portal This box: Campaign finance reform is the common term for the political effort in the United States to change the involvement of money in politics, primarily in political campaigns. ...
Over seventy countries around the world have implemented some form of freedom of information legislation. ...
General Accounting Office headquarters, Washington, D.C. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the non-partisan audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of Congress, and an agency in the Legislative Branch of the United States Government. ...
The Committee on Standards in Public Life is a Standing Committee of the British House of Commons. ...
2005 World Map of the Corruption Index, which measures the degree to which corruption is perceived to exist among businesses, public officials and politicians. ...
References - ^ Schedler, Andreas (1999). "Conceptualizing Accountability", in Andreas Schedler, Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner: The Self-Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, pp. 13-28. ISBN 1-55587-773-7.
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Ed.
- ^ Dwivedi, O. P. (1989). in Joseph G. Jabbra: Public Service Accountability: A Comparative Perspective. West Hartford, Conn.: Kumarian Press, pp. 1-10. ISBN 0783775814.
- ^ Scott, Marvin B.; Lyman, Stanford M. (Feb. 1968). "Accounts". American Sociological Review 33 (1): 46-62. ISSN 0003-1224.
- ^ Austin, J.L. 1956-7. A plea for excuses. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. Reprinted in J.O. Urmson & G.J. Warnock, eds., 1979, J.L. Austin: Philosophical Papers, 3rd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 175-204.
- ^ Standards in Public Life: First Report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life (1995) Cm2850 page 14 text accessed at [1] June 12, 2006
- ^ Public service Committee, Second report, Ministerial Accountability and Responsibility, Session 1995-6, HC 313.
- ^ Grant, Ruth W.; Keohane, Robert O. (2005). "Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics". American Political Science Review 99 (1): 29-43. DOI:10.1017/S0003055405051476. ISSN 0003-0554.
ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ...
A digital object identifier (or DOI) is a standard for persistently identifying a piece of intellectual property on a digital network and associating it with related data, the metadata, in a structured extensible way. ...
ISSN, or International Standard Serial Number, is the unique eight-digit number applied to a periodical publication including electronic serials. ...
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