Paper short abstract:

This paper shows how new accountability ideals in public sector organizations create feelings of discomfort such as blame, anxiety, guilt and shame among public servants. We suggest that the new ideals may endanger both the professional judgement and the work environment in the public sector.

Paper long abstract:

Along with recent public reforms inspired by New Public Management and Responsive Government ideals follow new accountability ideals and relations in public sector organizations (Strathern 2003). Some studies (e.g. Skærbæk 2009; Gendron et al. 2009; Kurunmäki 2004) have shown how these accountability relations change the professional identities of public professionals. But there is little focus on how new accountability relations generate effects at the emotional level among public sector employees and how this, in turn, affect work and well being in the organizations. The scarce attention is surprising because, as John Roberts puts it,: "… the scene of accountability is almost invariably highly charged emotionally…" (Roberts 2009, p. 961).

In this paper we argue that along with new organizational accountability relations also follow strong affective reactions from the individual employees. Based on ethnographic and interview studies in the Danish public sector; a science department at the University of Copenhagen and ministries subjected to performance audits, we investigate how public professionals perform in order to live up to ambiguous organizational accountability ideals. We show how this, on the one hand, implies new daily responsibilities, different tasks and novel distributions of work (Glerup 2015), but, on the other hand, simultaneously produce serious "discomfort" (Justesen and Skærbæk, 2006) and strong emotions such as shame, guilt, anxiety and blame among the employees. Based on the empirical studies, we suggest that the accountability ideals and -relations may endanger both the professional judgement and the work environment in public sector organizations.