Ron Ashkenas points out in an HBR article'One of the most sacred tenets of management is the need for clear accountability. As such, organizations spend enormous amounts of time and energy defining jobs, roles, and goals -— and then figure out who to reward or punish when things go well or poorly'.
I'm sensitized the topic partly because of the number of times I've heard the words 'accountable' and 'accountability' this past week. They cropped up, for various reasons, in just about every meeting I was in. Reasons included: some to do with two or more people trying to do the same thing, some to do with no-one doing whatever was supposed to be done, some to do with lack of control over third party activity, and so on.
I am not alone in hearing 'accountable' and accountability' at every turn. Jerry Muller in The Costs of Accountability writes 'that "accountability" has become a ubiquitous meme-—a pattern that repeats itself endlessly, albeit with thousands of localized variations'. His is a critique of our cultural obsession both with the concept and with enacting the concept.