Performance measurement as a policy instrument

ABSTRACT

The rise of government by indicators, by figures may reveal a new wave of rationalization organized by the state in the classic Weberian sense. Contemporary forms of government are marked by the rise of indicators, measures and new metrics to compare, certify, codify and evaluate. In many countries, performance measurement has become one of the symbols of the transformation of governance. The paper aims to show how performance indicators are a particular type of policy instrument that increases competitive pressure within societies even if that cannot be analysed only in terms of neoliberalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy instruments
• indicators of performance
• reshaping of the state
• governance
• rationalization

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Paul Henman for comments and the invitation to the workshop organized at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Patrick Le Galès, FBA, is CNRS research professor in Politics and Sociology at the Centre d’Etudes Européennes de Sciences Po and Dean of the Urban School. Publications include, The New Labour Experiment (with Florence Faucher-King, Standford University Press 2010), L’instrumentation de l’action publique (with C. Halpern, P. Lascoumes), Presses de Sciences Po 2014 (Forthcoming in English), Globalising Minds, Roots in the Cities, Upper Middle Classes in Europe?(with Alberta Andreotti and Javier Moreno Fuentes), Wiley/Blackwell 2015, The Reconfiguration of the State in Crisis in Europe (with Desmond King) Oxford University Press Forthcoming 2016.

Notes

1. These paragraphs owes much to my colleague Pierre Lascoumes.

2. Weber used the term ‘bureaucratic revolution’ to characterize the ways in which individual conduct is changed ‘from without’ by altering the conditions to which they must adapt. In his analysis, bureaucracy as a revolutionary force stands opposed to the other great revolutionary force, charisma.

3. Neoliberalism is a serious issue. But Dean (2014) eloquently makes the point about the overblown use of neoliberalism.