What Is Wrong With New Zealand'S Service Performance Reporting Model

Abstract

Service performance reporting is now a part of life for public museums in New Zealand, however it operates alongside the museums' own heritage of standards and performance criteria. These two sets of criteria represent two necessary sources of authority, influence or power at work in a museum - loosely described as the line authority and the museum professionals - deriving respectively from endowments of physical and cultural capital and jointly determining a museum's character and how well it performs. Appraisal of the service performance reporting process against this perspective on museum organizations reveals that, if optimal museum performance is to be the aim, revisions to the process are needed to circumvent endemic problems of narrow and unrepresentative goals, with inability to meet measurability criteria and short-termism.

Keywords:

• Accountability
• agency theory
• museums
• New Zealand
• non-financial
• performance measurement
• public sector