A 2020 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title How officials reporting to both executive officials and congressional representatives work to keep the government honest, efficient, and effective. Inspectors general are important players in the federal government, and their work often draws considerable public attention when one of them uncovers serious misdeeds or mismanagement that make the headlines. This book by two experts in public policy provides a comprehensive, up-to-date examination of how inspectors general have operated in the four decades since Congress established the offices to investigate waste, fraud, and mismanagement at federal agencies and to promote efficiency and effectiveness in government programs. Unique among federal officials, inspectors general are independent of the agencies they monitor, and they report to the executive and legislative branches of government. One key factor in their independence is that they are expected to be non-partisan and carry out their work without regard to partisan interests. The authors of U.S. Inspectors General: Truth Tellers in Turbulent Times emphasize the “strategic environment” in which inspectors general work and interact with a variety of stakeholders, inside and outside the government. Their new book is based on in-depth case studies, a survey of inspectors general, and a review of public documents related to the work of inspectors general. It will be of interest to scholars and students of public policy and public management, journalists, and ordinary citizens interested in how the government works—or doesn’t work—on their behalf.

This book explores the meaning and practice of empowering methodologies in organisational and social research. In a context of global academic precarity, this volume explores why empowering research is urgently needed. It discusses the situatedness of knowing and knowledge in the context of core-periphery relations between the global North and South. The book considers the sensory, affective, embodied practice of empowering research, which involves listening, seeing, moving and feeling, to facilitate a more diverse, creative and crafty repertoire of research possibilities. The essays in this volume examine crucial themes including: · How to decolonise management knowledge · Using imaginative, visual and sensory methods · Memory and space in empowering research · Empowerment and feminist methodologies · The role of reflexivity in empowering research By bringing postcolonial perspectives from India, the volume aims to revitalise management and organisation studies for global readers. This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of management studies, organisational behaviour, research methodology, development studies, social sciences in general and gender studies and sociology.

Public accountability is critical to a democracy. But as government becomes ever more complex, with bureaucracy growing ever deeper and wider, how can these multiplying numbers of unelected bureaucrats be held accountable? The answer, more often than not, comes in the form of inspectors general, monitors largely independent of the management of the agencies to which they are attached. How, and whether, this system works in America is what Nadia Hilliard investigates in The Accountability State. Exploring the significance of our current collective obsession with accountability, her book helpfully shifts the issue from the technical domain of public administration to the context of American political development. Inspectors general, though longtime fixtures of government and the military, first came into prominence in the United States in the 1970s in the wake of evidence of wrongdoing in the Nixon administration. Their number and importance has only increased in tandem with concerns about abuses of power and simple inefficiency in expanding government agencies. Some of the IGs Hilliard examines serve agencies chiefly vulnerable to fraud and waste, while others, such as national security IGs, monitor the management of potentially rights-threatening activities. By some conventional measures, IGs are largely successful, whether in savings, prosecutions, suspensions, disbarments, or exposure of legally or ethically questionable activities. However, her work reveals that these measures fail to do justice to the range of effects that IGs can have on American democracy, and offers a new framework with which to evaluate and understand them. Within her larger study, Hilliard looks specifically at inspectors general in the US Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security and asks why their effectiveness varies as much as it does, with the IGs at Justice and Homeland Security proving far more successful than the IG at State.