Don't be a dinosaur! Temporal structuring of NGO accountability

Abstract

This paper investigates how imposed accountability practices become workable. Focusing on the implementation of results-based management (RBM) in an international NGO, it examines actors' engagement with, and appropriation of the temporal logics embedded in the standardised accountability practice. Drawing on an interpretive, qualitative case study of one country unit, the paper mobilises insights from critical accounting research and sociological accounts of time. Based on interviews, observations and documentary evidence, the analysis traces how accountability is enacted and reconfigured in practice. The paper contributes to research on NGO accountability by identifying temporal appropriation as a mechanism through which imposed accounting practices become workable. The findings show that RBM embeds distinct temporal structures – forward-oriented planning, project cycles and time-bound indicators – , which individuals experience as misaligned with the rhythms of their social work. Rather than resisting or merely complying, they are appropriated: Social workers are not only reorganising when, how and in what sequence accountability is enacted – in other words, the temporal organisation of accountability – but also negotiating what their work means and to whom they feel responsible. The study highlights the importance of attending to the temporal assumptions embedded in accountability practices. It suggests that accountability systems should allow for temporal flexibility and interpretive leeway in how structuring elements like reporting cycles, planning horizons or indicators are enacted in practice. Building on and extending Orlikowski and Yates's (2002) account of temporal structuring, the paper argues that temporal structures do not merely coordinate work but carry evaluative assumptions about what counts as impact, on whose timeline and to whom actors are accountable – making temporal structuring a value-constituting process. It thereby shows that time is simultaneously tension-introducing and appropriable in accountability; it extends research on the socialisation of accountability by showing that temporal appropriation operates as a medium alongside relational interaction; and it uses the notion of temporal porosity to explain why accounting inscriptions differ in their openness to reinterpretation.