THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE
Organizational and Service
Improvement in the Public Domain
Books by
Colin Talbot
Introduction
Why The Issue of Performance Will Not Go Away
Performance measurement and management of public services has been on the rise across many countries in recent years. It is widely perceived to have started around the late 1980s or early 1990s, but in fact discussions about various aspects of performance – not always using that label – go back far beyond that period. In 1916, for example, the US Congress established a ‘‘Bureau of Efficiency’’ to tackle waste in US federal government (Lee 2006). But it is also clear that there is currently a very real ‘‘performance movement’’ (Radin 2006a), and one which is likely to expand further as many advanced states face fiscal problems following the 2007–9 global financial and economic crisis. Demands will grow for government that ‘‘works better and costs less’’ (Gore and National Performance Review 1993) as the consequences of the financial and economic crisis for public finances develops. The performance of public agencies is thus both a perennial and a contemporary issue – just one of the many paradoxes surrounding the subject.
There are theoretical, empirical, and practical reasons why this subject will not go away, and while it may wax and wane, it is certain to always return to center stage in academic and policy circles from time to time for the same reasons.
The theoretical and empirical reasons are both simple and complex. In the early 1980s, writing about what was then called ‘‘organizational effectiveness’’ (OE) studies, a couple of experts in the field pointed out that all theoretical conceptualizations of organizations implicitly addressed the issue of which organizational forms were more or less effective (i.e., performed) (Cameron and Whetten 1983b). While they were writing about all organizations, this applies equally to public and private sectors. Moreover, in empirical research on organizations, ‘‘effectiveness’’ (or performance) was the ultimate dependent variable – in the end all studies were studies of what made organizations more or less effective. The really complex theoretical and empirical problems start to arise in defining and then measuring effectiveness or performance
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BOOKS
