Questioning Performance Measurement: Metrics, Organizations and Power by Guy Redden

Author:Guy Redden [Redden, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781526462862
Google: HTOADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2019-03-11T05:39:13+00:00

Business performance measurement in question

As a way to compare performances and place them into hierarchies of value that are then routinely used as a basis for the determination of rewards, business PM (BPM) seems consistent with (if not a technique for engendering) the socio-economic inequalities of the neoliberal ‘new economy’. However, if we bracket the larger issue of whether it promotes the sectional interests of managers and owners, there are also grounds to question whether it is necessarily effective in its own terms. Does it really create valid, useful knowledge of things critical to success? And does it really cause organizational actors to improve what they do and achieve excellence?

As argued in Chapter 3, when it does not comply with social scientific methods to ensure validity and reliability, the idea that the quantification of ‘performances’ creates robust knowledge about the world should be questioned. It is worth noting that in the 1970s and 1980s before BPM became widespread, an academic specialism within organization studies had sought to establish the social scientific principles of organizational effectiveness. Researchers debated and discussed terminology, levels of analysis and the ‘conceptual bases for assessment of performance’ insofar as it is an issue across organizational types (Venkatraman and Ramanujan 1986: 801). In summarizing the state of play in the field, Ford and Schellenberg (1982) noted, though, that research was so inconclusive and disagreement so extensive that the viability of studying performance should be questioned. The problems revolved around exactly which characteristics of organizations and variables should be selected, what indicators of performance should be employed, and ‘who should set the criteria and/or do the assessing’ (49). This pursuit was riven by the problems of demonstrating the validity of performance variables and reliability of methods, and especially establishing how the influence of factors outside a firm’s or actor’s control could be accounted for (Glaister and Buckley 1998: 90). The flipside was the problem of arbitrating between numerous proposed ways of measuring effectiveness to determine consistent and generalizable methods. Although the academic specialism endures, it has produced rival schools of thought rather than consensus, and it has been largely displaced by the field of PM (Cameron 2010).

Organizational effectiveness research failed to establish convincing social scientific grounds for transferable models of organizational performance and its measurement. However, the matrix of BPM was business and management studies precisely during a period, as Khurana (2010) has shown, when it had moved away from social scientific approaches under the influence of finance and economic theory. It promised to deliver precisely what the organizational effectiveness field could not: complete models for determining, measuring and improving the key critical success factors of any business. It was able to do so because it was not weighed down by rigorous social scientific protocols. Nørreklit (2000) was one of those who questioned the empirical basis of the four perspectives, generic indicator domains and the causal models of the BSC. She suggests that the overall ‘balance’ proposed to apply to all cases is idealized, that the relationships between

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