Speaker:  Professor Jennifer Lewis, University of Melbourne

Larry Saha Room, HA2175, Haydon Allen Building (22) The Australian National University

Measuring performance is now firmly entrenched in public sector organizations. Behind the performance movement is the search for rationality, and much of the academic work on it deals with creating robust measures, reducing gaming, and linking it more tightly to management. An important topic that is less often studied is the inherent power involved in the decision to measure performance, as well as decisions about what is measured, how and why.

I argue that performance measurement should be understood as the social structure arising from the interactions of institutional rules and individual responses to those rules. This work proceeds from an interest in seeing actors and systems as fundamentally interlinked (Michel Crozier) and in the unintended consequences of social action (Robert Merton). Organizations constrain actors, but actors still have freedoms. Actors make (boundedly rational) choices, but they cannot fully know what the consequences of those choices will be. I propose that two contrasting versions of a chain of performance measurement (one rational-technical and one realistic-political) are useful as a starting point to focus on the dynamics, interactivity and power of performance measurement.

Public bureaucracies shape the incentives and opportunities of individual actors at each link in the chain, through the formal structures and rules and the available resources. Actors (individuals and organizations) are able to game any element of the chain of performance measurement – from attempts to make the structures of political bureaucracies more accommodating to particular views and interests, and influencing policy and strategy, right through to how the consequences (desirable and undesirable) are dealt with. This starting point is being used to empirically examine the health and higher education sectors in Australia, Canada and the UK, in work that is related to my Future Fellowship, and I will discuss this as a work in progress in the seminar.

Speaker:
Professor Jenny M Lewis is Professor of Public Policy and Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2013-16) with the School of Social and Political Sciences. Jenny is a public policy expert, with particular interests in governance, the policy-making process, policy networks, and the politics of performance measurement. She moved to Denmark to take up a professorship in 2010 and returned to Australia as a Future Fellow in 2013. Jenny has published widely in international journals and books, and has been awarded American, European and Australian prizes for her research. In recent years she has held a number of senior research roles.