Flexible Supervision:information Power And Its Practice In Institutional Process

Within the Chinese government,in order to promote effective implementation of policies,each level of government gives its direct subordinates sufficient flexibility when delegating governance tasks downward.However,policy implementation flexibility and implementation deviation often go hand in hand.After granting flexibility to subordinates,higher-level governments may face the risk of subordinates deviating from institutional constraints and pursuing self-interested goals.In the practice of government governance,the supervision and control of the superior over the operation of the subordinate power constitutes an important part of the operation of the bureaucratic system.The effectiveness of vertical supervision and accountability is based on the ability of higher levels of government to obtain accurate information and make precise assessments of the performance of functions at lower levels.To this end,this paper focuses on audit supervision,and takes a grassroots audit organization as the object of study.Through examining the process of performing audit supervision functions,it attempts to present the practical characteristics and logic of action in the field of power supervision in the hierarchical organization.The article takes the elastic operation of audit supervision as an entry point and analyzes the different dimensions of elasticity.Based on this,the main clues are the attributes of audit supervision matters in terms of information clarity and rule adaptation,and the specific discussion of the process of performing the functions of audit institutions in financial and fiscal auditing,resource and environmental auditing and project fund auditing is launched.The article analyzes the differences in the behavioral strategies chosen by audit institutions when facing different types of audit matters,and summarizes the different practical forms of audit supervision flexibility operation and its generation logic.The study found that,as a component of the public power supervision system,the practical operation of audit supervision is not completely in accordance with the rules designed by the formal institutions,but rather in a relatively flexible and standardized way of collecting,processing,and providing feedback on audit information.In this paper,we refer to such a way of operation as flexible supervision,which flexibly adjusts the scale of audit supervision and audit execution strategy depending on the situation.The reason for auditing institutions to carry out flexible supervision is mainly because they hope to eliminate the tension between the response system and practice through flexible adaptations,and to balance the interests of all parties.In different audit assignments such as financial and fiscal auditing,resource and environmental auditing,and project fund auditing,audit implementation faces different tensions in institutional practice due to differences in the attributes of audit supervision matters and differences in the interaction of the relationship between the audit parties.It is from the adaptive response to these tensions that different manifestations of flexible supervision have been derived.Specifically,the flexible operation of financial auditing mainly stems from the plurality and conflict of rules in the process of economic responsibility performance.The flexible implementation of resource and environmental auditing is actually the result of the joint shaping of the ambiguous information of ecological and environmental governance and the absence of qualitative audit rules.The flexible supervision in project fund auditing is mainly due to the influence of project operation characteristics and the implied inter-organizational governmental relationship behind them.Based on the above analysis,this paper proposes that the flexible operation of audit supervision represents the limited exercise of audit authority and the partial realization of audit function,and ultimately presents the limited constraints of power supervision.The essence behind the flexible supervision highlights the change of rhythm between lax and strict governance,and the dynamic grasp and timely adjustment of the criterion of governance.In this sense,the strength and effectiveness of public power supervision depends mainly on the determination and will of decision makers,and power supervision itself evolves into an institutional tool to serve the need of governance flexibility.