Performing the state: the socio-political dimensions of performance measurement in policy and public services

ABSTRACT

This opening paper outlines the rise of public sector performance measurement and performance governance from New Public Management, its trajectory from an administrative tool for organisational monitoring and management, to its insertion into service performance and accountability, to a policy tool defining policy itself. Four key conceptual ways of approaching public sector performance measurement are outlined, and the significance of understanding performance measurement as a socio-technical policy instrument is argued. The paper thematically reviews the papers that follow and how they demonstrate new points of critical analysis in policy studies, including the multiple, mixed and sometimes contradictory purposes for performance measurement, the formation of performance measurement tools, the linkages of performance numbers and governance structures from macro to micro, and the reconfigured roles of professionals in public service delivery. The paper issues a clear challenge to policy researchers to take performance measurement more seriously in understanding the dynamics of policy performance, the achievement of policy objectives, the reframing of policy and the experience of citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance measurement
• performance governance
• NPM
• policy instruments
• Australasia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Paul Henman is Associate Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Queensland. His research examines the nexus between social policy, public administration and technology.

ORCID

Paul Henman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9923-6587

Notes

1. See also Henman et al. (2014) for a more comprehensive analytical framework to support critical social analysis of performance measurement.

2. This dynamic parallels the rapid enumeration of the state through the census and statistics from the eighteenth century onwards (Desrosières and Naish 2002; Higgs 2004).

Additional information

Funding

This paper arose out of research funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant [DP110100803].