Transformational change and the vacuum of performance measurement: How a story of success became a failure

Abstract

Some local government organisations stand out in terms of their capability to adopt and use management accounting innovations and become a model for those struggling with issues such as performance measurement (PM). But what happens to the innovations if the organisation is forced into transformational change? This longitudinal case study is based on the theory that the use and impact of PM is influenced by (a) its contractibility and (b) how the performance management systems in place are configured and used. One conclusion is that transformational change can result in a vacuum of PM, even with a high degree of contractibility.

Senior public leaders’ perceptions of business intelligence

“…Although the senior leaders understood the importance of business intelligence, the institutionalized behavior, encouraged by the dominant logic of internal control, seemed to discourage extensive use of business intelligence. The dominant logic, encouraging local government to focus on internal control systems, has been noted by researchers following NPM reforms (Ramberg, 2017;Kuhlmann and Bogumil, 2018).…”

“…Different kinds of obstacles and dominant logics fostered by the institutional framework surrounding local government and how these affect the need for and use of business intelligence is a concern in this paper. The magnitude of institutionalized behavior, which can be based on different dominant logics, has also attracted researchers in the fields of both private and public sector research in management and cooperation (Ezzamel et al, 2012;Pache and Santos, 2013;Ramberg, 2017;Kuhlmann and Bogumil, 2018).…”

“…Public sector research has devoted much attention to the impact of public organizations' implementation of various control tools from the private sector (Lapsley and Knutsson, 2017;Ramberg, 2017). This research has recently begun to consider the strategic approaches within which these tools are to be applied ( Johanson, 2009;Hansen and Ferlie, 2016) and whether strategic management is improving the performance of public sector organizations (Favoreu et al, 2016).…”

Charities and resilience: From austerity to COVID‐19

“…The two case studies were selected as they allow for an in-depth consideration of a particular phenomenon (Stake, 1995) and for comparisons to be drawn between cases (Yin, 2004). Longitudinal case studies are beneficial to understanding change in organizations (Ramberg, 2017),…”

“…The two case studies were selected as they allow for an in‐depth consideration of a particular phenomenon (Stake, 1995) and for comparisons to be drawn between cases (Yin, 2004). Longitudinal case studies are beneficial to understanding change in organizations (Ramberg, 2017), and their importance in public services research is detailed by Wond and Macaulay (2011). The longitudinal aspect of this study allowed investigation into how the nature of different crises influenced response.…”