ABSTRACT
Although organizational sociologists have warned us against over-reliance on effectiveness models (Etzioni, 1964; Hasenfeld, 1983), the accountability movement, the advent of the computer, and the fiscal attraction to business administration techniques in times of scarcity have led human service organizations and their funding sources to place great emphasis on statistical measurement of effectiveness and efficiency. For agencies and programs, life and death decisions are often based on statistical indicators such as number of client contacts, number of units of service delivered, number of closed cases, average length of stay, and the like (Bielawski & Epstein, 1984; Conrad, 1985).
