The New Public Management supplies a rationale for broadening the mandate of external audit institutions to encompass performance auditing. This article examines conceptual, empirical, and managerial issues raised by external performance auditing. Conceptually, performance auditing is a misnomer for a class of mainly evaluative review activities. Empirically, OECD countries vary in terms of the specific types of performance audits conducted by their principal external audit bodies. Explaining such variation offers some insight into the contemporary politics of public management policy. Managerially, audit bodies whose mandate includes performance auditing confront two major strategic issues: whether to conduct such evaluative reviews in an auditing style and whether to gear their work to achieving performance improvement in auditee organizations.Performance auditing is fast becoming accepted as a type of professionally conducted after-the-fact review activity in government. This category subsumes familiar kinds of review work, such as efficiency audits and certain kinds of effectiveness studies, as well as less familiar kinds of reviews, such as audits of information generated by performance management systems. The emergence of this new category in the lexicon of public administration indicates that a process of demarcating a new domain of bureaucratic activity is under way. New institutionalist sociological theory (Meyer and Rowan 1991) would suggest that-as the performance auditing domain becomes institutionalized-the level of activity will increase, perhaps accompanied by the elaboration of distinct subtypes or "product line extensions."The organizational sites for elaborating and expanding performance auditing are varied. In the UK such sites include the Audit Commission for England and Wales, whose remit covers local government, the National Health Service, and the police; the National Audit Office, whose remit covers the remaining core of central government; and a rapidly expanding array of sector-or agency-specific inspectorates, such as the Office for Standards in Education (Hood and Scott 1996). In the US, sites for elaborating and expanding performance auditing include departmental-or agencylevel Offices of Inspectors General and the General Accounting Office
Critics of public management reform complain that governments copy legitimated foreign practices. Recent work by Eugene Bardach helps to explain why: neither government analysts nor academic researchers possess an adequate methodology to examine practices in source sites, with a view toward adaptation in target sites. Rather than complain, Bardach takes steps to develop such a methodology, drawing analogies with reverse engineering. This article offers specific guidance about how researchers can effectively investigate practices in source sites to prepare the ground for disciplined and ingenious extrapolation of practices from source to target sites. The resulting translation is illustrated by an extrapolation-oriented case study.The literature on public management reform is replete with accounts of how paradigmatic ideas and templates of organizational practices gain currency, travel widely, and settle into policy and practice in diverse locales (e.g., Aucoin 1990;Hood and Jackson 1991;Pollitt et al. 2001; SahlinAndersson 2002). These accounts-inspired to a large degree by the new institutionalism in organizational sociology-discern causal patterns in the recent history of public management reform. While such theoretical developments are needed (Barzelay and Gallego 2006), they nonetheless remain silent on a range of prescriptive matters that attract the attention of public management scholars and directly concern practitioners. One prescriptive issue is how participants in a social undertaking (Wenger 1998), such as operating a governmental program or performing an organizational function, should prepare to take actions with the intention of improving it. A usual presumption in our culture is that participants should do so, in part, by learning from experience. Two kinds of experiences are seen as candidate sources of learning: lived and vicarious ones (Levitt and March 1988). Under vicarious learning, actors take advantage of experience with undertakings in which they do not directly participate.
Research on public management reform has taken a decidedly disciplinary turn. Since the late 1990s, analytical issues are less often framed in terms of the New Public Management. As part of the disciplinary turn, much recent research on public management reform is highly influenced by the three new institutionalisms. However, these studies have implicitly been challenged by a competing research program on public management reform that is emphatically processual in its theoretical foundations. This article develops the challenge in a more explicit fashion. It provides a theoretical restatement of the competing "institutional processualist" research program and compares its substantive findings with those drawn from the neoinstitutionalisms. The implications of this debate about public management reform for comparative historical analysis and neoinstitutional theories are discussed.
As a measure to rectify the European Commission's “management deficit,” the institution's authorities decided to introduce new forms of commission‐wide strategic planning and programming in 2000. Drawing on semistructured interviews with Commission officials, this article tracks the key turning points, trajectories, and outcomes of events within the implementation stage of this part of the Commission managerial reform. As an instrumental case study, the article begins to theorize the process of implementing public management policy change. Major conceptual issues addressed include how reform decisions serve to activate the social mechanism of actor certification and how actor conduct amplifies such certification. Actor certification provides a link from reform choices to organizational change. In this respect and others, the research argument contrasts and integrates social theory mind‐sets deriving from institutionalism and social interactionism (processualism) in line with research trends in historical sociology, organization science, and public management.
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