ABSTRACT
One question has been looming throughout the previous chapters, a question whose answer is vital for the very rationale of any book on strategic management in public services organizations: what is the impact of strategically managing a public services organization on its performance? Does the level of performance change (improve) because of the ‘strategic choices’ that are made in a public services organization, as contrasted to the absence of strategy case? In other words, does strategic management make a difference? And if so, how and to what extent? It is the main task of this chapter to address such questions. Indeed, the authors
(Andrews et al., 2012) we quote in the start of this chapter have made through their work a major contribution to demonstrating that the widely held idea that strategic management does make a positive difference to performance is well grounded, though they also warn about the complexity of the causal chains linking different strategies to diverse dimensions of performance in public services organizations (Andrews et al., 2012, see especially pp. 146-48 and 158-62). It has been argued that autonomy and permanence may be an overarching goal of
public organizations (Vining, 2011). Yet, it is dubious that the public to which public services organizations are accountable may be satisfied to know that public organizations are effective in pursuing the inward-facing goal of ensuring their own survival. Indeed, accountability (and the related dimensions forming ‘responsiveness’, in the terminology of Rainey, 2010) is in itself a dimension of performance demanded of public organizations, as are fairness (due process), equity and equality (in treating users of public services, in adjudicating cases), neutrality, openness, and so on. Efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability (and the related dimensions forming ‘competence’, in the terminology adopted by Rainey, 2010; see also Bozeman and Straussman, 1990) constitute another set of profiles of performance deemed of central importance for a public services organization; indeed those are the kinds of performance that strategy is primarily purported to improve, though we would argue that strategy may have an impact also on the other dimensions of performance (i.e. its accountability, equity and neutrality, etc.). The positive
contribution of strategy to performance is part of the very rationale for interest in the strategic management of public services organizations, as we discuss in Chapter 1. More broadly, we argue throughout this chapter that the adoption of a ‘schools of thought’ approach to strategic management in the public sector (paralleling and hopefully matching the contribution made by Mintzberg and colleagues to the study of strategy in the private/ commercial sector) may further our understanding of ‘how strategy matters’ for public services performance levels. In the unfolding of this chapter, we at first dwell on the notion of ‘performance’ and
its relationship with public management (this section), before delving into the issue of whether and how strategy may make a difference to the performance of public services organizations (sections 2 and 3). Performance assessment and its management have become increasingly important in
many public services settings but this domain is far from uncontested and raises a number of important issues. Jenny Lewis’s case on research performance management systems in Australian universities (see Box 7.1) highlights their connection with national-level NPM-style reforms. The (re)design of successive metrics within this system reflected changes of political control and also extensive bargaining within the academic system about choice of appropriate methods to be used (e.g. metrics vs. peer review; quantitative vs. qualitative assessment). There was recurrent contest, for example, as to which journals were ranked in official lists as top class (A star) and why. This national performance management system in turn intensified performance man-
agement within individual higher education institutions, with the danger that crude quantity-based measures could be over-employed. The implications of the more elaborate performance management regime – and the resulting judgements arrived at – for the career of the individual academic could be considerable.
