The work of Berman, Keehley et al., and Ammons revisits the ghosts of management movements past while also presenting us with a somewhat mutable present and future—albeit, a present and future that still largely deal with the concept of the organization as reified entity. Their explorations and explications of productivity and benchmarking practices have roots in the rationalist school and also faintly echo early twentieth century management lore. As a result of the authors’ serious efforts, the reader cannot help but be left with the awareness that definitions of organizational effectiveness are contingent evolving constructs.

Frederick W. Taylor’s seminal 1919 The Principles of Scientific Management not only ushered in the era of scientific management but also the perennial beliefs that to measure is to control; and, that there is a “one best way.” The work of other early twentieth century public administration theorists such as Henry Fayol, Mary Parker Follett, and Luther Gulick put a more human face on Taylor’s mechanistic approach by refining, redefining, and expanding upon Taylor’s dictum of the one best way. Taylor’s work and that of the early public administration theorists provide the conceptual benchmarks for much, if not all, of the public management literature in vogue today. These literatures rest upon the theory and practice first articulated by Taylor and subsequently reconceived by organizational theorists. The works of Berman, Keehley et al., and Ammons build upon this foundation. Their efforts continue the discourse while treading the all too familiar paths of the past.

There are two current schools of thought that dominate the discourse on organizational effectiveness. Mintzberg labeled the two schools “Peterian” and “Porterian” after Tom Peters and Michael Porter. “To Porter effectiveness resides in strategy, while to Peters it is the operations that count—executing any strategy with excellence” (Mintzberg 1991, 54). That strategy could take the form of productivity improvement and/or benchmarking efforts in private, public, and nonprofit organizations. However, regardless of the sector in which these strategies are employed, the end sought in all instances is greater organizational effectiveness. These three books resurrect, reinvent, demystify, and at times mystify, the current practices and approaches to productivity improvement and benchmarking for best practices.

Zeroing in on Productivity

In Productivity in Public and Non-profit Organizations: Strategies and Techniques, Evan M. Berman argues that productivity is an important organizational matter in the public and nonprofit sector. In doing so, he offers managers strategies that can be utilized to improve organizational productivity. Berman begins this discussion by introducing the concept of productivity, which he defines as “the effective and efficient use of resources to achieve outcomes” (5). He maintains that although the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency are important to public, nonprofit and forprofit organizations, it is important to distinguish their relative importance within each organizational type. Berman suggests that, within the public sector, effectiveness is more important than efficiency. For example, “many citizens are more concerned with the effectiveness of 911 services (e.g., that services arrive on time with appropriate personnel and equipment) than with efficiency of 911 services (e.g., the cost of timely response)” (7). In contrast, effectiveness and efficiency are of equal importance to nonprofit organizations, primarily due to resource scarcity and the challenges of fundraising.

Productivity measures are needed to evaluate organizational effectiveness and efficiency. But the measurement of productivity in organizational settings continues to raise questions of validity and reliability. Berman recommends that organizations build their capacity for data gathering and analysis by viewing their initial efforts as experimental. In developing surveys, he proposes a question formulation strategy that includes “deciding what information target respondents can provide” (71). Berman underscores the importance of asking stakeholders questions that they are equipped to answer.

Berman then focuses his attention on the role of management in employing strategies to facilitate productivity improvement. He contends that managers should utilize a strategic perspective to identify problems, measure productivity and achieve success. Such strategies include engaging multiple stakeholders by incorporating community-based strategic planning, partnering with relevant public, private and nonprofit organizations and using information technology to increase productivity. A major challenge for public-sector managers is addressing the needs of multiple stakeholders. Berman addresses the need for organizations to identify multiple stakeholders and to recognize the important differences within each of these groups. As Berman correctly notes, “Partnerships are a flexible way of organizing such efforts, but they require considerable forethought in planning and negotiating as well as hands-on management of the various relationships” (144). These challenges are met by grounding strategic change in a conceptual framework.

Berman argues that the “single greatest influence on productivity improvement in recent years has been the quality paradigm” because “it drives new developments in productivity improvement” (266–7). He views Total Quality Management (TQM) as the quality paradigm’s core philosophy (157) and contends that the introduction of TQM has yielded eight general lessons: 1) implement quality improvement strategies in manageable pieces; 2) all quality improvement strategies require top management support—most require leadership, too; 3) quality efforts must match quality readiness; 4) appointed official and elected officials/board members play different roles; 5) quality is a change effort, not a program; 6) quality strategies do not address crises; 7) quality improvement produces some short-term results, too; and 8) quality requires additional resources—but not many (159–61).

Berman also gives attention to an under-studied topic in the post TQM era—the role of ethics in organizational productivity. Ethics, as Louis Gawthrop (1998) suggests, is morality in action and can foster the implementation of the common good as promised in a democratic society. Similarly, Berman challenges managers to rise above viewing ethics as rules and regulations and to adopt a more normative application that “enables people to rise above their own self-interest and that of others, and allows people to examine existing practices for being insufficiently open, supportive, accountable, or focused on stakeholder needs” (272).

As the title suggests, this book focuses on productivity in public and nonprofit organizations. However, Berman’s examination of organizational productivity in nonprofit organizations is more limited in scope than his examination of public organizations. He gives minimal attention, for example, to the important role of nonprofit boards. Nonprofit organizations operate under a tripartite system, including a board of directors, an executive director, and staff. These components form the important foundation of governance and leadership and have direct implications for organizational productivity (Houle 1989).

Benchmarking and Other Mysterious Practices

Keehley et al.’s Benchmarking for Best Practices in the Public Sector: Achieving Performance Breakthroughs in Federal, State and Local Agencies, approaches a complex and very important contemporary management tool from the varied perspectives of the practitioner, senior management, and the consultant. Their diverse backgrounds and many years of experience in the public and private sectors, as well as their successes in benchmarking for best practices in both arenas, provide legitimacy for these efforts.

The reader of this book should take the authors’ caveat to heart. The book is a process guide that requires a reader’s investment in time and effort to generate a return. The return has many dimensions, but largely is manifested in sustainable improved performance at the individual and overall organizational levels of practice. The rationale provided for adoption of the identified benchmarking practices is that “By comparing your organization to public or private sector leaders that provide similar services, you can achieve leapfrogging improvements in the way you work. We are not talking about gradual, incremental change but about radical change that produces significant gains in performance” (xii).

The authors incorporate useful resources, checklists, and tools for the benchmarking neophyte in search of best practices at various levels of government. They define benchmarking as “a process for identifying and importing best practices to improve performance” (39) and a best practice as “anything better than your current practice” (19). While their discussion of best practices is at times ambiguous, the authors do nonetheless provide the reader with a clear sense of what benchmarking is and is not.

Benchmarking is not a simple comparative study, copying practices from other organizations, performance assessment, or an anecdotal form of comparative analysis (41). Benchmarking is a methodological process for identifying and importing best practices to improve performance (39). If there is a flaw in the authors’ effort to fully explicate benchmarking qua best practices, it rests upon the shifting sands of benchmarking practice itself. The authors note that: “It is not yet a science, but it is more than art” (96).

Keehley et al. argue that benchmarking is important to government agencies and public administrators for a variety of reasons: 1) It works; 2) Recognition is likely to follow; 3) Other organizations have already started; 4) Building on the work of others makes sense; 5) You cannot afford not to; 6) It leads to cooperation; and, 7) Taxpayers are viewed as customers (1–11). At first glance these reasons may appear overly simplistic. However, the authors do succeed in providing the reader with a coherent but at times tenuous rationale. While the authors’ rationale may resonate with the reinvention acolyte it may not play so well with the practitioner who is at wits’ end trying to do ever more with ever less.

The reader in search of either a compendium of best practices or a consensus definition of the term itself will be disappointed. This is because definitions of best practices are as diverse as the origins of the practices themselves. Keehley et al. tell us that “A best practice is declared by the media or others” (21). The “others” are periodicals such as Governing, Public Management, or books such as Reinventing Government and Excellence in Government. Best practices also may merely be published by the organization that uses the practice, or by groups or individuals familiar with a topic. And lastly, “others consider a best practice to be any emerging industry trend that seems to make sense” (20).

In spite of the seemingly amorphous and ambiguous nature of best practices, the reader should not be left with the idea that benchmarking for a best practice is anything we want it to be. What emerges from the authors’ discussions of how to prepare for benchmarking (17–80) and conducting benchmarking to accommodate and initiate best practices (93–200) is that best practices for a given organization are both defined and developed through the process of their pursuit. Benchmarking for best practices as process thus becomes a recursive activity.

The authors’ caveats for those who would pursue this process are familiar ones to any practitioner who has implemented or participated in management initiatives. The process should not be pursued blindly or by the noncommitted. Benchmarking efforts within an organization may be greeted with skepticism, distrust, apathy, resistance, and other dysfunctional behavior. If the initiative is to succeed, these emotions and behaviors must be overcome. Benchmarking requires, at a minimum, a two-year commitment of time and resources by top management and the employees of the organization.

Through the Municipal Looking Glass

Ammons’ Municipal Benchmarks: Assessing Local Performance and Establishing Community Standards includes a collection of performance indicators that cross jurisdictional contexts in an attempt to facilitate comparative, rather than isolated, analyses. He asserts, “Those who have followed the prescriptions have soon discovered that a performance measure is virtually valueless if it appears in the form of an isolated, abstract number. Its value comes in comparison with a relevant peg” (3). The “pegs” for this analysis are comparative cross-municipality data from governmental units that perform similar functions.

Municipal Benchmarks is targeted toward three primary audiences: 1) Elected officials who seek a framework for evaluating municipal operations; 2) government managers who want to improve their performance measurement systems; and 3) citizens who “wish to know whether their community’s public services really measure up” (7–8).

The core of the volume examines performance standards in a number of local government departments: animal control, city attorney, city clerk, courts, data processing, development administration, emergency communications, emergency medical services, finance and budgeting, fire service, library, parks and recreation, personnel administration, policy, property appraisal, public health, public transit, public utilities, public works and engineering, purchasing and warehousing, solid waste collection, and traffic engineering and control. Each chapter is structured to: 1) identify and justify benchmark possibilities; 2) provide implementation examples from multiple jurisdictions; and 3) offer suggestions for data interpretation. Ammons is quite successful in accomplishing his first two goals. For example, in the chapter focusing on personnel management, he provides indicators that are associated with public personnel management: (a) merit systems and principles; (b) personnel administration by a personnel department; (c) performance appraisals and provision for merit pay; (d) formal disciplinary and grievance procedures; and (e) formal affirmative action and sexual harassment policies. Ammons presents employee turnover and absenteeism as indicators of employee morale, and prompt scheduling of employee grievance hearings as an assessment of personnel administration performance in handling employee grievances (181).

These core chapters present comparative data taken directly from municipal reporting documents. For instance, he provides data on average response times to fire emergencies for 51 municipalities. These data facilitate comparative analysis both within and across large, mid-size, and small municipalities. Reno, Nevada, responds to 55 percent of fire emergencies within four minutes or less, compared to 74.1 percent for Portland, Oregon, thus serving as “pegs” to commence analysis (116–7).

Ammons is less successful in the third area: data interpretation. In discussing employee turnover, he cautions, “Low rates of turnover and absenteeism often accompany good supervision and high morale, but low rates could also reflect a tight local economy and few job options” (179). This caution is correct, but it provides limited managerial guidance. How should elected officials, managers, and citizens evaluate the validity of performance indicators? Each of these groups has the responsibility to question and critique data derived from performance measures.

Ammons’ book is a useful guide for municipalities as they develop performance indicators and seek to compare their performance with similar governmental departments nationwide. He certainly makes the case that data collection and sharing are important tools in municipal benchmarking.

To Measure, Define, and Contextualize Realities

In concluding our review, we summarize our impressions of the authors’ works. We also posit that performance measurement yields maximum returns when utilized within a larger context. This latter pursuit is a call to integrate the practice covered by the authors with praxis—practice informed by reflection on theory.

A common theme across all three texts is recognizing the critical need for organizations to partner and share performance data. One of the major limitations faced by organizations in comparing performance outcomes is the lack of standardized data. Key terms are often defined, measured, and reported differently. This significantly limits an organization’s ability to engage in meaningful, cross-organizational comparisons. Ammons used professional standards promulgated by professional associations. However, many municipalities modified those standards, or chose to use different standards altogether.

The six municipalities examined in Ammons’ discussion of child immunization rates, reported their statistics in six different ways: Cincinnati reported the percentage of school children meeting immunization requirements; Boston reported the percentage of children immunized by the time they start school; Alexandria reported the percentage of children with immunizations that are current; Houston reported the percentage of children under age two having had complete immunizations; New York City reported the percentage of new students completely immunized; and Jacksonville reported the percentage of completely immunized two year olds (211). The use of myriad measures significantly limits the ability to make meaningful cross-organizational comparisons.

Organizations that are serious about embarking on performance measurement should first assume the responsibility of agreeing upon a core set of standardized performance indicators. Additional, independent measures can then be developed for specific organizational use. If organizational managers are uncomfortable with the idea of developing standardized data, then logically, they should experience equal discomfort in relying upon or generating comparative reports based upon non-standardized data. The performance measurement sword must cut both ways.

The utility of benchmark and performance measures is maximized only when measures are valid, reliable, standardized, and sensitive. Sensitivity refers to the likelihood that an effect, if present, will be detected (Lipsey 1998, 39). These issues, though critically important to the discussion, receive minimal critical attention by Ammons and Keehley et al. Consider, for example, performance measures for pothole repair. Ammons identifies “prompt repair of potholes” as an appropriate performance measure where several municipalities seek to repair potholes within one day of notification (250). But this measure does not consider the important, external environmental context. Perhaps, the pothole is reported during a winter snowstorm. It may be both more effective and efficient for the department of public works not to repair the pothole within one day of notification. In this example, efficiency and effectiveness may indeed be present, but not detected by the performance measures employed. To Ammons’ credit, it is not that time-specified repair of potholes is an inappropriate performance measure, but rather, that performance measures are most meaningful when considered against a broader context.

As we use and refine the management techniques and tools these authors have written about, we must be ever mindful that the productivity measures and best practices we seek to implement are ultimately only meaningful because they are a part of a larger whole or context. The context can be viewed as the department or organization’s mission, the individual or aggregated employees’ drive to achieve, the larger community’s explicit or implicit values, or the confluence of all of these—and more. Productivity measures, improvement, and benchmarking for best practices activities should not become ends in themselves.

Perhaps the greatest common limitation of all three texts is that they present the evaluation of organizational productivity, effectiveness, and efficiency as a primarily quantitative activity. Consequently, the default solution to ineffective quantitative measures is designing better quantitative measures. Evaluating organizational productivity may be better accomplished by relying upon quantitative and qualitative measures. Data triangulation can be an important tool in understanding productivity in a broader context. Reviewing discrepant data can assist in identifying flaws in both developing initial reasoning and generating conclusions. Collecting data from employees with first-hand knowledge about a department or program’s environmental conditions is important in developing performance measures, and useful in data interpretation. Acknowledging the key nexus between human activity and data creation may also help mitigate the employee skepticism and resistance to performance measurement that Berman and Keehley et al. discuss.

All three authors accept the reconceptualization of citizens as customers. Although this view may have widespread currency in the public management literature and ongoing reinvention of government efforts, it is a flawed view that separates citizens from their government. Robert Denhardt argued that, “The relationship between a public organization and its clients or the citizenry generally is just not the same as between a business and its customers. The idea of public service is absolutely central to public organizations, but to speak of a ‘customer’ orientation is to speak in terms more closely associated with private business. At the most basic level, the user of government services rarely pays directly for those services in an open marketplace as do customers of private businesses” (Denhardt 1992, 73). Public sector organizations cannot select their customers, nor use a vague definition of customer, such as client, taxpayer, or elected official. Moreover, the public services that are provided in many instances promote the health, safety, and general welfare of the community as a whole. The citizen as customer metaphor vitiates the ideal of democratic governance and replaces it with a hollowed out sense of citizenship. If we must view government as a business, then perhaps a more appropriate metaphor would be that of the citizen as owner—with a vested and active interest in the continued operation of the enterprise.