Accountability in social services provision Three cases from the sixteenth century Republic of Venice

By adopting a historical perspective, this paper addresses the role of accounting in enabling “hybrid organizing”, a phenomenon involving those organizations which operate between the market and the public service logics. The empirical setting of this research is the Republic of Venice throughout the sixteenth century: that is, a time and a place of diffuse forms of welfare organization, between the Church, the State and private initiatives. The paper analyses three cases of charities variously involved in social services provision; it identifies evidence of their hybrid nature and explores, for each, the governance system as well as their accounting and accountability practices. The authors wish to thus contribute to the research on organizational responses to institutional complexity by theorizing about the role of accounting and accountability in this endeavor.