ABSTRACT
We have cracked open the question “What is performance?” by posing another one: which performance? While cultural critics, artists, and activists have defined performance in terms of social efficacy, managers and organizational theorists have constructed performance as organizational efficiency. There is, however, yet another community that takes a very different perspective on performance. Rocket scientists, for instance, debate the relationship between temperature and “O-ring performance.”1 Material scientists analyze the “performance of metals” and find “aluminum-zinc alloys outperforming polymeric composites.”2 Engineers chart the “universal performance curve” of land transportation vehicles.3 Finally, computer scientists seek to develop “high performance computing systems using scalable parallel designs and technologies capable of sustaining at least one trillion operations per second (teraops) performance.”4 All these researchers are interested not in cultural or organizational performance, but in technological performance.
