Offentligt etos i granskningssamhället - En studie om tillsyn av skolor och lärares drivkraft att tjäna allmänintresset

Abstract

Auditing has occasionally found itself to be regarded as institutional distrust amongst scholars in the field, whom hypothesize effects such as deprofessionalization to take place among the auditees. This study seeks to explore potential side-effects of auditing activities and explore if they bear correlation to the auditees motives to serve the common good (Public Service Motivation, PSM), which is presumed to be affected negatively by auditing. Beginning in a survey with primary school teachers in Gothenburg municipality, Sweden (N = 92), empirical analysis is carried out with three sample groups of teachers, selected on basis of whether they have been audited by the Swedish School Inspectorate and if the audit resulted in remarks or not. The findings are that the prevalence of school inspection is likely to have little or no impact on PSM among the teachers audited since the correlations were both weak and insignificant. The second purpose of this study is to in turn investigate if the attribute of Public Service Motivation has an effect on the respondent’s attitudes towards auditing, which earlier research on related study objects propose, given that the auditing is not seen to be in conflict with values of the common good. Following the construction of an index for attitudes towards auditing to analyze with PSM, the results verify this premise with significant-level regressions, implying that an individual’s PSM-level have a clear correlation with his or hers attitude towards the auditing of schools. While the effects of auditing activities are shown to be complex, this study contributes to our further understanding of auditing in the form of school inspections and its correlations with motives to serve the common good. Both inspectorate agencies and schools might draw insights from the results for their respective organization’s development in relation to each other. Further research in this area could apply the thesis theory and method on other forms of auditing to control for consistence in results.