The manager, the citizen, the politician and performance measures

McKevitt, David; Lawton, Alan

doi:10.1080/09540969609387933

Cited by 36 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Although there was public compliance, privately individuals challenged, attacked, and dismissed the value of business plans and performance measures. The current evidence of this activity is in keeping with other research that has shown that coercive pressure results in procedural compliance, a mechanical process of implementation focusing on external needs and requirements, to ensure legitimacy, but a lack of embeddedness, as performance measures fail to become part of operation management (McKevitt & Lawton, 1996). Although there was compliance or acquiescence with coercive isomorphism, there was resistance to mimetic isomorphism: the private sector model was explicitly rejected.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 50%

The Role of Competing Rationalities in Institutional Change.

Townley¹

2002

Academy of Management Journal

383

160

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Academy of Management THE ROLE OF COMPETING RATIONALITIES IN INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE BARBARA TOWNLEY Edinburgh UniversityReporting on a longitudinal case study of the introduction of business planning and perfornance measures in cultural organizations, this article uses Weber's identification of types of rationality as a means to illuminate institutional and organizational change. The study illustrates how conflict that accompanies change coalesces around different dimensions of rationality-substantive, practical, theoretical, and instrumental-that inform organization members' understandings of organizational and professional identity and management practices.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 50%

The Role of Competing Rationalities in Institutional Change.

Townley¹

2002

Academy of Management Journal

383

160

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“…It is, however, a contested issue whether a decoupling of various performance indicators will hamper or stimulate changes to the organization's activities. There is evidence that a decoupling of performance (McKevitt and Lawton, 1996), but it could also stimulate the use of this information for both legitimizing and controlling purposes (see also Weick, 1976;Johnsen, 1999, pp. 54-60).…”

Section: Effects On the Supply And Use Of Performance Informationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Understanding the changing role of public sector performance measurement in less developed countries

Tillema

Mimba

Helden

2010

Public Admin & Development

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SUMMARYThis article develops a framework for understanding changes in the demand for and supply of performance information in public sector organizations in less developed countries (LDCs). New Institutional Sociology (NIS) is used to argue that pressures from specific stakeholders stimulate organizations to produce particular performance information. The article distinguishes three groups of stakeholders (i.e. funding bodies, statutory boards and purchasers), and elaborates on the performance dimensions these stakeholders are interested in. The group of funding bodies, with their interest in financial performance information, used to be the most important group of stakeholders. However, statutory boards and purchasers are gaining importance as a result of recent public sector reforms, which include decentralization, marketization and the implementation of anti-corruption programs. As a consequence of pressures coming from these stakeholders, new performance dimensions, such as the quality and quantity of services and the political governance structure, will be added to organizations' performance measurement (PM) systems. Whether these and other-often more traditional financial-performance dimensions will be balanced and integrated throughout organizations depends on the power positions of the various stakeholders. The arguments presented in this article intend to stimulate public sector organizations in LDCs to design and redesign PM systems as a response to changing stakeholder interests.

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“…As far as PM is concerned, an NIS perspective may lead to a more pragmatic stance, seeing the apparent "over-proliferation" of PIs and lack of coupling to clearly stated goals as less of a weakness, but rather a natural response to the need to provide information to a broad range of constituencies with vaguely defined and occasionally conflicting interests (Brignall and Modell, 2000;Feldman and March, 1981;Meyer and Gupta, 1994;Modell, 2004). A primary theme in empirical research informed by this approach has been to explore how public sector managers and organizations respond to external pressures to adopt various PM practices (see Johnsen, 1999;Johnsen et al, 2001;Lawton et al, 2000;McKevitt and Lawton, 1996;Modell, 2001;Townley, 2002). However, little attention has been paid to the development of models and standards for PM at the macro level of different organizational fields and the processes involved in establishing PIs and evaluation procedures that organizations are expected to comply with.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%