In public sector organizations, strategies and management accounting are often developed with the ambition of providing a combination of long-term objectives and short-term evaluations. This combination is sometimes labelled Strategic Management Accounting (SMA). The purpose of this chapter is to enhance our knowledge about SMA in the public sector context. We do this through a qualitative study of the Swedish Public Employment Service, which in 2020 launched a new strategic direction to manage changes in the agency's environment, along with a balance scorecard (BSC). The research question for this case was: How is the BSC used by a public sector agency as an SMA tool? Our results show that the agency's operational managers and controllers use the BSC as an SMA tool to create active management and control, while at the same time being reactive with a short-term focus. We address these results in relation to an idea of flexibilization, more specifically the desire to become a flexible agency that can change and adapt to short-term changes.

This article focus on the conditions and reasons why organisational members articulate support for a newly introduced outcome-focused performance measurement and management system (PMS) in a public sector context. It does so through an analysis of the introduction of a performance measurement and management system named “Delivery Qualities” in a Swedish central government. The PMS was introduced by the Swedish government as a solution to societal critic, which initiated a process of handling and processing PMS in the case organisation. We argue that the reasons why members of the case organisation embraced the outcome-focused PMS are because it was not existing PMS. In the case, it is suggested that the outcome-focused PMS was, in essence,providing a more suitable link to ideas and ambition in the organisation.