Timeline

• December 1, 2026: Submission deadline

Timeline

• December 31, 2026: Submission deadline

Timeline

• July 31, 2026: Full paper submission deadline

Leighton Andrews, Cardiff University

Matthew Collins, Cardiff University

Ministers and civil servants operate within formally shared constitutional arrangements but increasingly divergent professional cultures. Ministers are drawn from, and remain accountable to, a political environment defined by electoral cycles, media scrutiny, and their parties. Civil servants, by contrast, are shaped by institutional norms of political impartiality and long-term organizational continuity. Where those two paradigms were once held in productive tension by well-understood constitutional conventions, that tension has now become corrosive. Ministers have grown more likely to publicly attribute blame to officials (particularly at the most senior level, with at least 10 permanent secretaries being removed from post early since 2020). Parliament has pressed for the personal accountability of named civil servants, and civil servants have responded by becoming more risk-averse and, in some cases, more deferential to ministerial preference than honest analysis would support. The consequences for the quality of policy advice, and for policy performance more broadly, are both substantive and cumulative.

We recognize that constitutional settlements which order the relationship between ministers and officials are neither natural nor permanent, but were forged at particular moments and have endured precisely because they proved adaptable to the pressures subsequently placed upon them. The Westminster model has been taken up and remade across its various jurisdictions at successive moments of acute strain, very often in the aftermath of war or state crisis. The recurrence in our own time of anxieties about honesty, impartiality, blame and accountability should not let us forget that these questions have been asked, and provisionally answered, before. Reflecting on that history may therefore help us gain perspective on contemporary pressures, and deepen our understanding of where present events might yet take us.

This PMM theme issue invites theoretical and empirical contributions that examine the minister–official relationship and its implications for how policy is made and delivered. We welcome papers that focus on either side of the relationship, or on the relationship itself, provided there is a clear connection to questions of policy performance or governance. The primary focus of this PMM theme is the Westminster model, but comparative contributions that engage with one or more Westminster model jurisdictions are welcome. Papers that draw on Westminster experience to engage with broader theoretical frameworks in public administration will also be considered. We welcome submissions using qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods designs, as well as conceptual and theoretical contributions that deepen understanding of the relationship and its implications.

Potential topics

• The nature and dynamics of trust between ministers and civil servants
• The politicization of advice and its consequences for advisory quality
• Risk aversion, deference, and the suppression of honesty
• Ethical and conduct standards
• The role of special advisors in mediating the minister-official relationship
• The consequences of ministerial turnover for policy continuity
• The impact of organizational or departmental culture
• Parliamentary accountability and the personal exposure of named officials
• The constitutional position of ministers and/or civil servants
• Historical perspectives on the cycle of strain and reform in the minister-official relationship, particularly those that reflect the impact of crises

Timeline

• January 31, 2027: Deadline for research articles
• March 31, 2027: Deadline for debate and new development articles

Younes Ben Zaied, EDC Paris Business School

Shajara Ul-Durar, University of Sunderland

Assil Guizani, EDC Paris Business School

Alessandro Marra, University d'Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara

The presence and representation of women in key strategic roles have emerged as critical factors in strengthening governance and enhancing public service outcomes. While gender diversity has attracted scholarly and policy attention in the private sector, its role in public administration, public service organizations, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) remains comparatively underexplored—despite its central importance for efficient, equitable, and democratically accountable governance.

Gender diversity can influence public sector decision-making in several important ways. For example, some research shows that female leaders tend to adopt more collaborative and consensus-oriented decision styles, suggesting that women are often associated with stronger attention to stakeholder inclusion, social equity, and the long-term societal outcomes that are essential in public governance.

Moreover, gender-diverse teams are consistently associated with higher-quality deliberation and decision-making. By drawing on a broader range of experiences and cognitive frames, they are better positioned to identify blind spots, challenge implicit assumptions, and scrutinise prevailing orthodoxies. This diversity of perspective reduces the likelihood of 'groupthink', fosters more robust debate, and ultimately contributes to more resilient policy choices and more rigorous risk assessment and management.

Legal reforms, quota systems, and gender equality initiatives have emerged worldwide to promote female representation in public institutions and public firms. Examples include: the EU Gender Balance on Corporate Boards Directive; France's 'Loi Sauvadet' mandating 40% women in senior civil service appointments; Norway's Public Limited Liability Companies Act requiring that 40% of board members be women, initially applying this mandate to state-owned enterprises; Italy's Golfo–Mosca Law requiring SOEs to progressively increase female board representation to at least one-third; Canada's Gender Budgeting Act; Australia's 50% gender target for government boards.

Despite the reforms, major gaps persist, including uneven implementation, weak pipeline development, inconsistent executive-level representation, and insufficient evidence on the impact of these policies on organizational outcomes. This PMM theme will investigate how gender diversity within public organizations shapes performance, transparency, accountability, innovation, and trust in public institutions.

Potential topics

• Gender diversity and public sector performance
• Women in SOEs
• Public service delivery and gender-sensitive governance
• Barriers and enablers of women's advancement in public organizations
• Gender, ethics, and public integrity
• Future directions: towards gender-responsive public management
• Representative bureaucracy effects of women in executive agencies
• The extent to which mentorship and sponsorship programs improve women's advancement
• Gender differences in promotion rates in public agencies

Timeline

• September 1, 2026: Submission deadline for research articles and new development pieces
• November 1, 2026: Submission deadline for debate pieces

Zoe Radnor, Aston University

David Walker, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust

For this theme issue we are looking for disciplinary eclecticism. We seek contributions that bring together insights from several disciplines, including law, social sciences, public management and the study of politics. Traditionally public management has not engaged in 'constitutional' conversations. However, the rise of what has been identified within the political landscape as 'populism' calls for a cross-disciplinary perspective to understand whether, and how, it is impacting public management and administration.

Populism can be described as a movement rather than a single ideology adopted by any political doctrine, and it often presents complex problems in simple terms, offering direct solutions. In recent times, populism has seen a rise in politicians from the left (for example Julius Malema in South Africa, Lee Jae Myung in South Korea) and the right of the political landscape (for example Donald Trump in the USA, Javier Milei in Argentina and Nigel Farage in the UK).

For this PMM theme issue we are seeking both conceptual and case examples to address the questions raised. Understanding how public managers and administrators are navigating the current context is key to supporting public services and the public good. In addition to research articles, we are also seeking debate and new development pieces to shape the thinking and agenda for further consideration. We would like to understand the implications for both policy and practice.

Potential topics

• Are we facing the limits of traditional thinking in public management? Do public managers have a 'moral personality' with value commitment to liberal democracy and/or state continuity, hence a duty, moral or legal, to protect them?
• Does populism create a challenge for public managers to abide by good governance principles (for example, in the UK, the Nolan Principles of Public Life)?
• Are public managers obliged to defend the state from attack, rhetorical or actual; if so, by what means?
• Have public managers traditionally lacked 'voice' within the political–administrative interface and what challenges do they face with the rise of populism?
• Is there a problem, incipient or actual, facing public managers if they are becoming answerable to politicians with a value set that is antagonistic to the values of public management?
• How anachronistic are those Weberian doctrines of 'responsiveness', i.e. the idea that the primary duty of public managers is to obey political mandates as the sole source of legitimacy?
• What is 'extremism'/populism? Can extremism and populism be defined (proscribed) ex ante?
• Do public managers observe/answer to a code that protects them against orders (short of law-breaking)? Are such codes robust?
• How far do existing doctrines of accountability accommodate answerability for extremist policies?
• Do public managers including civil servants and military personnel have a 'moral' personality and/or ethical commitments that equip them/require them to resist political directives that might subvert existing conventions or constitutional order?
• What lessons could public managers learn from international and comparative perspectives from the rise of populism in different political systems and architectures?

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Hybrid symposium for potential contributors
• January 31, 2027: Submission deadline for research articles and new development pieces
• March 31, 2027: Submission deadline for debate pieces

Lorenzo Mizzau, University of Genoa

Leticia Labaronne, Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Katja Lindqvist, Lund University

Yeşim Tonga, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

Cultural organizations, ranging from museums and heritage sites to festivals, theatres and media production houses, represent a vital component of the public sphere. Regardless of their ownership, legal status, and business model, many of these organizations pursue public missions: they produce, distribute, and safeguard cultural value, make accessible collective cultural resources, support participation and expression and sustain the creative ecosystems that enrich civic life. Cultural organizations can thereby be defined as public organizations, not only because they may receive public funding or other forms of governmental support, such as organizations that operate at arm's length, but also because culture is deemed a collective good, which makes these organizations interesting from a public management angle.

Cultural organizations are facing increasing pressure to rethink their organizational design, managerial systems, and relationships with their environment. Funding frameworks have become more volatile; governments are reconfiguring their financial engagement with culture through co-financing or project-based mechanisms; and expectations of accountability and demonstrable impact have grown. Meanwhile, digital transformation and AI-driven technologies are reshaping how culture is produced, mediated, and experienced. These shifts challenge traditional models of management, organization and governance of and for cultural organizations, raising critical questions about sustainability, legitimacy, and the evolving societal role of cultural organizations.

At the same time, cultural work itself is also changing. New collaborative models, hybrid careers, and digital production platforms demand adaptive organizational processes, new forms of coordination and control, a varied array of skills, learning needs and professional identities, and a leadership capable of balancing artistic freedom with social, environmental and economic sustainability. Cultural organizations thus provide a powerful lens for examining the changing relationship between cultural work and public commitment to culture, by analysing how managerial and organizational structures interact with public policy and governance frameworks.

This special issue explores how cultural organizations can sustain their public mission while navigating organizational, sustainability and technological transitions. Conceptual and empirical contributions are invited that investigate how it is possible to reimagine cultural organizations' managerial practices, organizational models, and governance frameworks in pursuit of their public mission.

Potential topics

• Managerial and organizational design, governance frameworks, and co-ordination in cultural organizations and cultural policy systems
• Digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and enabling technologies in the organization and management of cultural organizations
• Careers and work in cultural organizations, including changing work conditions, hybrid and digital work models, and professional development
• Human resource management, leadership, and organizational culture in cultural organizations
• Organizational learning, knowledge management, and capability development in cultural institutions
• Managing change, innovation, and transitions in cultural organizations and institutions impacting them in response to societal and technological disruptions
• Evaluation, accountability, and performance management in the pursuit of cultural and public value
• Public finance models, policies and programs: debates, changes, and effects on cultural organizations
• Social, environmental and economic sustainability, resilience and strategic management in cultural organizations

Timeline

• October 12, 2026: Deadline for research articles
• December 31, 2026: Deadline for debate and new development pieces

Kathy Quick, University of Minnesota

Jean Hartley, The Open University

Eckhard Schroeter, German University of the Police

Nick Caveney, Hertfordshire Constabulary

This issue is open for debate articles offering distinctive, provocative and considered comments and arguments, perhaps from the world of practice. These articles are subject to review by the guest editors.

The audience for this themed issue is an interdisciplinary and broadly-defined community of academics and professionals who share an interest in the research of policing, law enforcement, and the provision of public safety from an organizational, managerial, governance and/or public policy analysis perspective.

Articles should explore questions of policing and public management, examining how political governance systems affect the provision of an effective, fair and accountable police service in both its ideal forms and practical manifestations. This includes analysis of how such systems affect the degree of police operational independence, comparative assessment of civilian scrutiny mechanisms, and governance structures of privately-provided police and security services.

Potential topics

• Legitimacy, equity, power, authority, governance and organizational performance in policing
• Organizational functions such as strategic planning, human resource management, budgeting and evaluation, coordination of operations, control and accountability of policing
• Cooperation with public and private partners
• Whether and how policing is value-creating or value-destroying in different settings and social environments
• Changing roles and expectations of police at points of political and societal change and/or stress and austerity
• Comparative analysis of policing values, operations, and consequences in or across different locales
• Political governance systems and their implications for effective, fair and accountable police service
• Police operational independence and comparative analysis of civilian scrutiny of police
• Governance mechanisms of private, non-governmentally provided police and security services

Timeline

• September 30, 2026: Manuscript deadline

Samanthi Senaratne, University of Sri Jayewardenepura

Nuwan Gunarathne, University of Sri Jayewardenepura

Miguel Marco-Fondevila, University of Zaragoza

Sabina Scarpellini, University of Zaragoza

The transition toward a circular economy has become a strategic priority for advancing sustainable development and addressing pressing environmental and social challenges. Unlike traditional linear economic models, characterized by the 'take-make-use-dispose' approach, circular economy principles emphasize resource efficiency, closed-loop systems, waste elimination, and the regeneration of natural systems. These principles strongly support many United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including responsible consumption and production, climate action, and sustainable industry, innovation, and infrastructure.

Despite its growing global significance, the shift toward circularity poses substantial challenges for accounting, reporting, assurance, and governance practices in business. Conventional accounting systems, designed around linear economic flows, often struggle to capture the value generated through circular business models. Practices such as resource recovery, remanufacturing, product-as-a-service models, circular supply chains, and sharing platforms introduce complexities that traditional financial and management accounting frameworks are not fully equipped to measure or report. As a result, organizations face critical gaps in monitoring performance, verifying value creation, and ensuring accountability and transparency within a circular economy context. This highlights an urgent need for scholarly inquiry into how accounting, reporting, assurance, and governance systems can be reimagined to better support circular economy practices and policies.

This Special Issue seeks to stimulate and advance interdisciplinary research at the intersection of accounting, reporting, assurance, and governance in the context of the circular economy. It aligns closely with the mission of the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal (SAMPJ) to foster research that addresses urgent social and environmental challenges while generating actionable insights into policy and practice. By encouraging critical reflections, empirical investigations, and innovative frameworks, this Special Issue aspires to shape both academic discourse and practical approaches in the evolving fields of accounting, reporting, assurance, and governance for the circular economy.

Potential topics

• Accounting and measurement innovations for advancing the circular economy
• Corporate governance models supporting the transition toward a circular economy and sustainable development
• Risk management and resilience strategies within circular economy business models
• Management control systems and performance measurement frameworks for circular economy practices
• Multiple capitals and value creation in the context of circular business models
• Circular economy accounting and reporting as enablers of sustainable development
• Assurance and credibility mechanisms for circular economy disclosures and reporting
• Regulatory frameworks and standards for accounting, reporting, and assurance in circular economy contexts
• Accountability, governance, and transparency practices for organizations adopting circular economy principles
• Digital technologies, data analytics, and traceability solutions supporting circular economy measurement and reporting
• Circular economy accounting and reporting within public sector and not-for-profit organizations
• Sector-specific approaches to circular economy accounting, reporting, and governance

Timeline

• February 15, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• August 15, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission

Othmar M. Lehner, Hanken School of Economics

Hendrik Vollmer, Warwick Business School

Lies Bouten, IESEG School of Management

For more than three decades, Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal has advanced a vision of accounting scholarship as a civic and moral project rather than a narrow technical domain. Its pages have persistently urged scholars to interrogate how accounting and auditing mediate the relationship between economic order, social justice, and ecological survival. Against this backdrop, the contemporary expansion of assurance into the sustainability arena reactivates core concerns about the politics of expertise, the plurality of value, and the search for a more equitable society through accountability. Yet the present moment also introduces qualitatively new conditions. Audit and assurance now intervene in domains of life, climate, and planetary risk that exceed traditional regimes of verification, raising questions not only of institutional adaptation but also new ethical dilemmas, epistemic challenges as well as questions of ontological design and pluriversal politics.

To understand these shifts requires a widening of the analytical purview from the professions and their jurisdictions to the practices through which audit governs futures, enacts moral boundaries, and is translated across institutions, systems, cultures, and ecologies. The aim of this Special Issue is to reimagine the audit society in the age of sustainability assurance as a plural, contested, and globally uneven field where accountability becomes a terrain of epistemic, value-based and power-related struggles.

Since the late twentieth century, the audit society thesis has provided a generative lens through which to examine how auditing extends beyond technical verification to the recasting of societal risks and uncertainties into auditable form. Over the decades, this lens has been mobilised to problematise audit's capacity to stabilise legitimacy in the wake of crisis, reform, and shifting expectations. Yet as audit is increasingly drawn into the governance of sustainability, climate risk, and social responsibility, we confront a critical inflection point. The logics of accountability once tethered to financial markets are being reconfigured by sustainability assurance regimes, transnational standard-setting, and intensified public contestation.

Audit today is no longer only a ritual of verification but a field in which the boundaries between professional authority, organisational identity, and societal imaginaries are unsettled and, to some extent, renegotiated. This Special Issue invites contributions that critically examine the audit society in the age of sustainability assurance, probing the shifting identities of auditors, the recursive dynamics of expectation and legitimacy, and the transformations of organisational and institutional processes and structures that follow. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers from all traditions, drawing from diverse methodologies and frameworks, from the sociology of professions to actor-network theory, institutional theory, critical audit studies, audit judgement research, economic sociology, and science and technology studies.

Potential topics

• Planetary and biopolitical accountability: How assurance practices translate planetary limits, biodiversity loss, or climate risk into auditable form; how audit participates in the governance of life and the environment.
• Ethics and social justice in assurance: How the expanding remit of sustainability audit redefines the moral economy of accountability and whose voices and vulnerabilities are recognised or silenced.
• Decolonial, linguistic, and transnational translations: How assurance is localised across global South-North contexts, how linguistic mediation shapes the meaning of evidence and credibility, and how post-colonial epistemologies challenge Western audit rationalities.
• Practice-based and participatory methodologies: How experimental, ethnographic, or action-research designs can reveal the micro-politics of assurance work and the reflexive production of legitimacy.
• Audit Expectation Gaps and Sustainability Assurance: how sustainability engagements reshape traditional distinctions of reasonableness, standards, and performance, and generate new legitimacy struggles; how potential users of assurance are enrolled to shape new forms of audit and audit reporting and how their diverging demands are navigated.
• Boundary Objects, Hybridisation, and Translation Work: The role of concepts such as materiality, assurance levels, or sustainability risks as mediating devices between professional, organisational, and institutional domains; the blending of accounting and audit practice, the formation of accounting-sustainability hybrids.
• Key Audit Matters and Transparency Practices: how the articulation of KAMs and equivalent disclosures in sustainability reports transform perceptions of audit judgment, credibility, and public accountability, how audits designed to verify whether mission-led companies genuinely implement and monitor their stated sustainability objectives can transform perceptions of audit judgment, enhance credibility and public accountability, and foster meaningful change within the organization.
• Institutional Work: how professionals establish, fail to establish, promote or resist the institutionalisation of sustainability assurance; how sustainability assurance shapes and is itself shaped by the formation of new professional fields, standard-setting arenas, and regulatory infrastructures.
• Auditor Identities and Professional Jurisdictions: how audit firms and individual practitioners navigate competing logics of financial audit, sustainability consultancy, and broader public accountability; how regulatory reporting and assurance reforms reshape the prevailing professional habitus and virtues of independence, ethics and technical competence, and more broadly positions of professional accounting bodies and accreditation processes.
• Surveillance, Traceability, and Digitalization: The effects of platformisation, digital taxonomies, machine-readable accountings, algorithmic verification, and datafication on the epistemics of audit practice, professional authority, and client relationships.
• Public Interest, Value(s), and Materiality: How pluralistic notions of publicness, planetary concerns, and double materiality are constructed, resisted, or institutionalised in assurance engagements.
• Group Judgment and Cross-Professional Collaboration: How auditors coordinate with specialists, regulators, and clients in multi-professional and cross-organisational contexts, shaping assurance outcomes.
• Historical and Comparative Perspectives: How earlier transformations of financial auditing illuminate the present trajectory of sustainability assurance.

Timeline

• April 1, 2026: Closing date for abstract submission
• June 12, 2026: Online paper development workshop (hybrid) at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki
• September 1, 2026: Opening date for manuscripts submissions
• December 1, 2026: Closing date for manuscripts submission

This Journal of Enterprise Information Management Special Issue seeks to understand Agentic Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI (GenAI) in healthcare, and how these technologies impact the governance, strategy, and value creation of healthcare organizations. In technological innovation, digital technologies are reconfiguring value creation processes and prompting organizations to develop new adaptive strategies. In healthcare, this transformation is driving the adoption of innovative solutions to enhance value for stakeholders while supporting more personalised, predictive, and preventive models of care. AI and GenAI are emerging as strategic levers for optimising resource allocation, supporting new care delivery paradigms, and accelerating research and development. The rapid emergence of Agentic AI systems introduces a further step in this transformation, with AI technologies moving from reactive tools towards semi-autonomous systems able to plan, coordinate and monitor actions across complex organizations.

Healthcare is a relevant setting for examining how innovation management shapes competitiveness, sustainability, and value-creation capabilities. Recent debate has shifted from a focus on the technical performance of AI systems to broader concerns related to implementation, accountability, trustworthiness, evaluation, and organisational sustainability. This shift is crucial in healthcare, where Agentic AI and GenAI are not merely digital transformation tools, but sociotechnical systems that potentially affect clinical practices, decision-making processes, care coordination, patient-doctor relationships, resource allocation and costs optimization.

AI and GenAI are sociotechnical systems with growing autonomy and interactive capabilities, thereby raising new questions around trust, responsibility, human oversight, and governance. As such, they pose a significant challenge to enterprise information management, affecting processes, data, professional roles, compliance, procurement, and monitoring systems.

The deployment of Agentic AI and GenAI occurs in high-risk, highly regulated, data and human-intensive settings. Healthcare organizations must balance innovation with patient safety, care quality, ethical and regulatory issues, data protection and human oversight preservation. Errors, biases and unclear accountability may affect patients, professionals and healthcare ecosystems.

This Special Issue seeks theoretical and empirical contributions examining how health systems, healthcare organizations, and providers develop capabilities, governance structures, and evaluation practices to move from experimentation to technology adoption and integration. Particular attention will be given to agentic workflow integration, responsible value creation, data governance, clinical and managerial accountability, human oversight, professional role reconfiguration, patient-doctor relationship, organisational capabilities and compliance with existing regulatory frameworks.

By focusing on healthcare as the empirical and theoretical context, this Special Issue aims to generate new insights into how Agentic and GenAI systems can be responsibly embedded in healthcare organizations while balancing innovation, safety, equity, trust, regulatory compliance and measurable clinical, organisational, and societal value.

Potential topics

• How are GenAI and Agentic AI reshaping clinical, administrative, and managerial workflows in healthcare organizations?
• How do healthcare organizations govern Agentic AI systems across care pathways?
• What organizational capabilities are needed to move from experimental GenAI applications to integrated and scalable Agentic healthcare systems?
• How can healthcare organizations ensure meaningful human oversight when AI systems become more autonomous, proactive, and embedded in clinical or administrative processes?
• How do GenAI and agentic AI create, capture, or potentially destroy value for different healthcare stakeholders?
• How do Agentic and GenAI systems transform healthcare knowledge management?
• How can healthcare organizations evaluate and measure the clinical, organizational, economic, ethical, and societal value generated by GenAI and Agentic AI adoption?
• What governance mechanisms are needed to ensure accountability, transparency and regulatory compliance in AI-enabled healthcare organizations?
• How do GenAI and Agentic AI affect decision-making processes within healthcare organizations?
• How can healthcare organizations manage risks related to automation bias, inequitable outcomes and over-reliance on AI?
• How do agentic AI and GenAI support healthcare system sustainability?

Timeline

• January 1, 2027: Opening date for manuscript submissions
• June 30, 2027: Closing date for manuscript submissions