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Over the years much has been written about the organization life cycle, yet there has been remarkably little attention given to the underlying construct of a life-cycle stage. It is proposed in this study that each life-cycle stage consists of a unique configuration of variables related to organization context and structure. Cluster analysis is used to derive a taxonomy of growth stage configurations in a sample of 126 high-technology organizations. The derived configurations suggest a sequence of four growth stages.

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Performance information is a key‐element of NPM, but politicians and managers rarely use this information. On the basis of three case studies, this paper seeks to explain the use of the newly developed performance information. The paper argues that there is a distinction between the customer perspective and the citizen perspective on performance. NPM implies a customer and an internal perspective on performance. These perspectives may be relevant to managers, but politicians are primarily interested in a citizen perspective and a financial perspective. Two situations are identified in which governmental organizations more actively use performance information with a customer perspective and an internal perspective (as implied in NPM): (1) a crisis in the organization's internal processes with political and/or financial consequences and (2) loose coupling of the performance reports to politicians and to managers, which stimulates the information use by both politicians and managers.

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