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Regulating Public Services: How Public Managers Respond to External Performance Assessment
Author(s) -
Döring Heike,
Downe James,
Martin Steve
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
public administration review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.721
H-Index - 139
eISSN - 1540-6210
pISSN - 0033-3352
DOI - 10.1111/puar.12400
Subject(s) - bureaucracy , performance management , negotiation , public sector , public management , new public management , business , public relations , key (lock) , subject (documents) , public administration , political science , marketing , computer science , computer security , politics , library science , law
Performance management systems have become a key component of contemporary public administration. However, there has been only limited analysis of the social construction of performance by public managers who are subject to them. This article examines the ways in which public managers create, maintain, and disrupt performance management practices. The authors find that managers make external performance assessments perform for themselves by constantly negotiating boundaries in ways that combine bureaucratic and managerial rationales. The authors argue that the ways in which organizational boundaries are constructed are fundamental to understanding the success or failure of performance management systems and the transformation of managerial ways of thinking about performance into a logic of improvement through which contemporary public sector reforms become embedded.