Accountability to competing account-receivers, implicit and explicit: A case of contests between accountabilities for perfect and imperfect truths

Accountability literature has usually conceptualized accountability as a phenomenon that principally involves two parties: the account-giver and the account-receiver. When accountability between these two parties fails, it is challenging to understand the reasons for this, especially if the account-giver appears to demonstrate good intentions. We show here how a reason for such failure could be that the account-giver implicitly brings in “a third party” to compete with the actual account-receiver. We show how this takes place and what the consequences are. Relying on a case organization with indoor air problems, we illustrate that accountability is there conceptualized from the perspective of truth, i.e. as accountability for truth. We present two forms of such accountabilities: accountability for perfect truth, i.e. for the “unerring” technical results about the indoor air as provided by measurement instruments, and accountability for imperfect truth, i.e. truth about employee safety and about how to avoid the symptoms employees feel they receive in the premises. Within the accountability for imperfect truth, account-receivers are seen to be the employees, while within the accountability for perfect truth, it is less clear who the account-receivers actually are. Here implicit account-receivers appear to be some “general humanity”, i.e. all those humans who in general appreciate truth (instead of e.g. lies). As such account-receivers are vague and implicit, it is difficult to resist such an accountability form as it is challenging to oppose such invisible elements of the accountability. The accountability for perfect truth thus dominates in the organization. Such a situation results in conflicts as the real and implicit account-receivers can be pitted against one another.