ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the most central narrative features of organizational performance tales. It emphasizes organizational performance being narrative productions, and aims to clarify the distinctive features of performance stories. Considering the way that most texts within management literature on performance approach performance and saying that performance is a story, thus involves a dramatic displacement of performance from the realm of action and results to the realm of accounts. Performance stories are stories that participate in the modernist belief in the possibility of separating with scientific certitude what is right from what is wrong, and in the progression of human conduct toward progress. The performance literature provides an extensive selection of performance measures. Differences in criteria lead, anyway, to the adopting of different points of view, different strategies of selection, collection, and inscription, and the production of differing performance texts.
