| Review of: | Challenging the Performance Movement: Accountability, Complexity and Democratic Values by Beryl Radin |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Leslie A. Pal |
| Reviewed in: | Governance |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 20, Issue 03, Pages 545-556 |
Book Reviews
This book's essential argument about performance measurement in government is simplicity itself: The performance movement, or at least the "classic approach" to performance measurement, is typically linear in logic and blind to the complexity of the world, narrow in its approach to organizations, insensitive to the appropriate role of professional and technical knowledge, focused on efficiency at the cost of other values such as equity, blind to the fragmentation of government, and far too confident about the reliability and neutrality of information required to assess performance. The result is an enormous amount of misplaced effort that can actually paralyze government instead of improving it, as well as a neglect of the subtler political and democratic context of contemporary public administration.
Radin is obviously right that performance has become an international mantra of management, particularly in the United States. Her 10 chapters explore each one of the features mentioned above, beginning with short, imaginative, narrative scenarios that illustrate situations where accountability mechanisms actually impede performance. There are also numerous extended case studies, particularly of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) and the Program Assessment Rating Tool. Her final chapter tries to step beyond critique with a brief list of 10 lessons that might temper a rigid approach to performance measurement.
There is nothing more convenient for a polemic than an exaggerated target. Radin claims that she is critiquing only a "classic" version of performance measurement, but the book as a whole is in effect an extended critique of performance measurement per se, as well as the new public management movement with which it is identified. Indeed, Radin clearly has several other targets in her sights: the Bush administration, pro-market management approach, and corporations. This political orientation is muted and does not overwhelm the text, although it crops up repeatedly in examples and illustrations.
More telling, however, is the claim that proponents of performance measurement are, on the whole, as stupid as she claims. Chapter 2, for example, on the "performance mindset" is a warmed-over critique of the rational model of decision making that is by now almost half a century old. Who seriously does not believe that the world is complex (the word appears repeatedly in the argument, as though it were a unique insight)? The same is true of competing values, the fragmentation of government, and the problems in the neutrality and quality of information. Outside of a few ideologues, or perhaps early and optimistic proponents of the movement when it was young, most reasonable people working in the field understand that performance measurement is fraught with difficulties. Most credible textbooks or guides to performance measurement in fact highlight precisely the points that she makes in her conclusion: society has multiple values, rely on a basket of measures rather than just one, be modest, build alliances, and consult.
In this sense, there are no new arguments or insights in the book. The case studies are interesting, but the arguments they illustrate are fairly pedestrian. The more interesting dimension of the book is what it does not address directly. First, why has performance measurement-across the social and political spectrum, from the GPRA to
Radin touches on some of these issues, although only obliquely (she has the most to say in several passages about the last question above). The major contribution of this book is to provide some detailed illustrations of the drawbacks of performance measurement that are widely acknowledged. What it lacks is diagnosis, explanation, or remedy.