1. From Accounting to Accountability: Organizational Supererogation and the Transformation of Nonprofit Disclosure

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Abstract

This paper advances the concept of organizational supererogation—denoting, colloquially, action that goes beyond the call of duty—as a lens for understanding how organizations respond to public evaluation and oversight. Building on current perspectives in organizational theory, supererogation views the criteria of external evaluations not as upper limits to be attained, but as minimum thresholds to be surpassed. I develop this perspective through a longitudinal analysis of 200 randomly sampled nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2004 to 2016, a period over which nonprofits became subject to a multitude of reporting obligations and disclosure demands. Through surveys, interviews, and longitudinal content analyses of IRS filings, I find that nonprofits chafed against compulsory evaluations, regarding them as ill-suited to organizational goals. Despite these pernicious effects, however, organizations neither minimized external scrutiny through ceremonial compliance nor conformed internal goals to external demands. Instead, they disclosed far more information and detail than was ever required or requested. To account for such supererogation, I argue that organizations embraced the broader ideal of accountability on which mandated practices were premised. Yet, because the specific codifications of this ideal ran counter to their values, they repurposed the technologies and techniques of mandated reporting as tools through which previously invisible values could be given facticity. Whereas compliance only allowed organizations to satisfy external accounting obligations, supererogation allowed them to pursue accountability as an organizationally distinctive ideal.

Author

• Aaron Horvath