ABSTRACT
For corporations, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and other US institutions, performance reviews have long meant something other than theater criticism. Throughout the twentieth century they played an important role in the management of human labor, in measuring work activity, developing skills, and making decisions regarding the hiring, firing, and promotion of workers. Performance reviews are an important tool in the field of organizational performance, a field of research and practice that includes the manual labor of factory workers, the office and information skills of pink-and white-collar employees, and the decision-making processes of top managers. Like cultural performance, the field of organizational performance is a highly contested one. Similarly, it must be understood as a construction: its performances are not simply “out there” in the world, but have been generated by a paradigm of research, which we shall call “Performance Management.”
