Accountability
Essay Preview: Accountability
1 rating(s)
Report this essay
Accountability
Accountability a word that is most often used and has several meanings, to give an example is responsibility, blameworthiness, liability and other terms. Accountability can be used is many places such as work, home and even on a battle field, it can also be used for little things for instance “taking a piece of paper from one destination to another” you are responsible for that piece of paper its condition and whether or not it gets to it destination. Or big things such as taking personnel from one destination or another, because you are responsible for there safety and ensuring you have everyone that is traveling with you from start to finish means you are responsible for there warfare.
There are times where I was accountable for personnel, paper work and other things. For instance I once worked at Del Taco as a crew member I was responsible for cleaning, money and proper food handling, cleaning wise I was accountable for making sure that the lobby was swept mopped tables wiped down and restrooms cleaned. Money, I was accountable for the cash. I also worked for McDonalds as a manager I was accountable for the whole store, my crew the money, making sure that inside and out was safe for my crew and customers. There were also the responsibilities that I had to delegate to my crew; they were accountable for there duties but I was accountable for following up on them. The job was not easy but it had to be done.
At its root, accountability involves either the expectation or assumption of account-giving behavior. The study of account giving as a sociological act was first explicitly articulated in a 1968 article on “Accounts” by Marvin Scott and Stanford Lyman, although it can be traced as well to J.L. Austins 1956 essay “A Plea for Excuses, in which he used excuse-making as an example of speech acts. Communications scholars have extended this work through the examination of strategic uses of excuses, justifications, rationalizations, apologies and other forms of account giving behavior by individuals and corporations, and Philip Tetlock and his colleagues have applied experimental design techniques to explore how individuals behave under various scenarios and situations that demand accountability.
In politics, and particularly in representative democracies, accountability is an important factor in securing good governance and, thus, the legitimacy of public power. Accountability differs from transparency in that it only enables negative feedback after a decision or action, while transparency also enables negative feedback before or during a decision or action. Accountability constrains the extent to which elected representatives and other office-holders can willfully deviate from their theoretical responsibilities, thus reducing corruption. The relationship