Navigating control and performance in emergency NGOs: the pivotal role of accountability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This study aims to investigate the pivotal role of accountability in shaping control mechanisms within non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in disaster relief, examining how it influences control practices and operational capacity in resource management. Design/methodology/approach We conducted a comparative case study based on 65 interviews with NGO experts in emergency crises and more than 300 documents. Findings Our findings highlight accountability as a driving factor that shapes the formality and coerciveness of control mechanisms, often in response to donor demands. Emergency NGOs apply various forms of formal and informal control, with financial transparency being crucial. While intrinsic NGO characteristics alone could not explain differing control configurations, we found that accountability affects operational capacity within each NGO type through its influence on control formalization and coerciveness. Originality/value Our findings challenge the belief that NGOs' intrinsic characteristics determine organizational control. Instead, accountability shapes control formalization. Our study offers practical insights for NGOs on how control choices affect operational capacity, examining multiple emergency NGOs in similar contexts rather than focusing on individual organizations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.016 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".