Constructing institutional performance: a multi-level framing perspective on performance measurement and management

Abstract

Research on performance measurement and management (PMM) informed by institutional theory has proliferated over the past two decades. Much of this research has concentrated on the institutional effects on organisational PMM practices and their consequences for organisational behaviour and has only recently started to pay more focussed attention to the effects of such practices on the construction of the very conceptions of performance that come to dominate institutional fields. To further integrative theory development, I pull these strands of research together into an analytical framework pivoting on the concept of institutional performance. Institutional performance is defined as the socially constructed conceptions of organisational performance that become firmly institutionalised as legitimate aspects of achievement in institutional fields. Adopting a multi-level framing perspective, I develop a set of research propositions reflecting how contradictory PMM practices, emerging in response to the institutional complexity attributable to heterogeneous and competing constituency demands, shape such conceptions of performance and how this contributes to reducing or reinforcing institutional complexity over time. I discuss the implications of applying this framework in empirical research and the contributions to institutional research on PMM as well as institutional theory, more generally, that may emerge from such research.

Keywords:

• framing
• institutions
• performance measurement and management

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of the paper were presented at the 9^th MASOP workshop (Innsbruck, 2016), the 10^th EIASM conference on “New Directions in Management Accounting” (Brussels, 2016) and research seminars at the University of Birmingham, University of Bristol, örebro University and the University of Stockholm. I am indebted to ChunLei Yang for our joint empirical work, which informs several, key inferences in the paper. I am also grateful to Thomas Ahrens, Christos Begkos, Jonas Gerdin, Eksa Kilfoyle, Kalle Kraus, Maria Major, Martin Messner, Jan Pfister, Antti Rautiainen, Bob Scapens and Eija Vinnari for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Special thanks go to Mark Clatworthy (the ABR Editor) for his support throughout the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/00014788.2018.1507811.

Notes

1. In the present paper, institutional theory denotes new (or neo-) institutional sociology, which is the primary strand of institutional thought informing the PMM literature under review (Modell 2009).

2. Such constituencies can be thought of as the key audiences from which organisations need to seek legitimacy (Deephouse and Suchman 2008, Bitektine and Haack 2015) and are typically made up of distinct sets of social actors with competing or overlapping demands on organisations in an institutional field (Kraatz and Block 2008, Wooten and Hoffman 2008).

3. Some of these authors equate institutional complexity with the prevalence of competing institutional logics (e.g. Greenwood et al. 2011, Micelotta et al. 2017). However, there is still an underlying assumption that such logics are underpinned by heterogeneous and competing constituency demands.

4. This form of decoupling is analytically distinct from more structural forms of decoupling, which are typically brought about by functional differentiation in organisations (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1977, Bromley and Powell 2012). However, the two types of decoupling may be interlinked in that functional differentiation provides opportunities for the discursive separation of frames (see e.g. Brignall and Modell 2000, Carlsson-Wall et al. 2016).