Publishing performance information: An illusion of control?

We live in the age of quantified performance. It is no longer sufficient to believe that a public sector organization does its job well, in general terms; or that the professionals within that organization can be relied upon. We want data that will allow us to judge and compare the behavior of service providers. In the new millennium, the number of schemes designed to satisfy this demand for performance data has grown substantially. The growth of rating and ranking programs is one of the dominant trends in contemporary public services reform (see also Arndt, 2007). As we shall show, ranking and rating schemes can vary in structure; sometimes they are established by government alone, and sometimes by a mix of governmental and private organizations; other rankings are private initiatives. Their ostensible aim is to improve control over the performance of service providers. In some cases control is exercised by central agencies, whose capacity to detect laggards is thought to be improved by such systems. Increasingly, control is also to be exercised by citizens, who are expected to use performance information to guide their own decisions about the choice of service providers (Coe & Brunet, 2006). The rationale for adoption of such systems seems difficult to challenge at first glance; they are often pitched as mechanisms for improving "transparency" and "accountability", concepts that are now so thoroughly entrenched in popular discourse that they have become banalities (Hood, 2007b). ...

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