Performance's mode of reproduction I: searching for Danh Võ’s mother

This essay returns to key debates in performance theory regarding the relationship between performance and reproduction, offering a Marxian inflected theory of performance’s mode of reproduction. It suggests that both performance theory and Marxist theory appropriate the mother function in describing performance’s mode of reproduction and the reproduction of capital, while displacing the mother in the process. Through a reading of the work of contemporary artist Danh Võ, the essay explores how performance’s mode of reproduction can affect the reproduction and sustenance of minoritarian life against historical, social, and economic forces of elision, erasure, and annihilation.     

Crime Victims’ Perceptions of Police Behavior,Legitimacy, and Cooperation: A Review of the Literature

According to Tyler’s theoretical framework, police officers can motivate cooperation among citizens during direct interactions by using fair procedures and by showing how the police perform their job in combating crime. By conducting a systematic literature review, prior research was examined to see whether perceptions of procedural justice and police performance result in higher levels of perceived legitimacy of the police institution, and in turn whether this perceived legitimacy stimulates cooperative behavior among crime victims specifically. Results of the 15 included studies indicate that partial support for the applicability of this framework on crime victims was found. However, none of the included studies tested all relationships within the framework simultaneously among crime victims; they typically focused only on one of the interrelationships between the frameworks’ key concepts. Implications for future research and police practice are discussed.     

The Effect of Information Asymmetry and Participative Target Setting on Target Ratcheting and Incentives

ABSTRACT

Using the performance evaluation data of Korean SOEs, the impact of information asymmetry within target setting on ratcheting intensity and the ratchet effect is investigated. It was found that ratcheting intensity is substantially greater (lower) for target-setting methods that have utilized limited (plenty of) information on past performance and that the ratchet effect increases with ratcheting intensity. These results indicate that information asymmetry between the superior and subordinates is one of the crucial drivers of the ratchet effect. It was also documented that when subordinates sufficiently beat target, the ratchet effect is much greater for relatively “top-down” target setting than that for relatively “bottom-up” target setting. This finding suggests that securing subordinates’ active participation in the target-setting process can alleviate their effort reduction incentive.     

How is the Use of Performance Information Related to Performance of Public Sector Professionals? Evidence from the Field of Academic Research

There is inconclusive evidence as to how performance management is actually related to performance, particularly in subfields of the public sector where professional work prevails. We propose that the association between the use of performance information and performance of public sector professionals varies with the targets of management control. We test our hypotheses in the field of academic research, a prime example of professionalism in the public sector. The overall results of an online survey with 1,976 observations suggest that performance management is positively related to publication performance when performance information is used for the control of input targets. In contrast, we find negative associations of performance information with performance when used to control output targets. Public managers in professional fields should consider these countervailing relationships when they compose and use control systems.     

Unravelling semi-presidentialism: democracy and government performance in four distinct regime types

Do semi-presidential regimes perform worse than other regime types? Semi-presidentialism has become a preferred choice among constitution makers worldwide. The semi-presidential category contains anything but a coherent set of regimes, however. We need to separate between its two subtypes, premier-presidentialism and president-parliamentarism. Following Linz’s argument that presidentialism and semi-presidentialism are less conducive to democracy than parliamentarism a number of studies have empirically analysed the functioning and performance of semi-presidentialism. However, these studies have investigated the performance of semi-presidential subtypes in isolation from other constitutional regimes. By using indicators on regime performance and democracy, the aim of this study is to examine the performance of premier-presidential and president-parliamentary regimes in relation to parliamentarism and presidentialism. Premier-presidential regimes show performance records on a par with parliamentarism and on some measures even better. President-parliamentary regimes, on the contrary, perform worse than all other regime types on most of our included measures. The results of this novel study provide a strong call to constitution makers to stay away from president-parliamentarism as well as against the idea of thinking about semi-presidentialism as a single and coherent type of regime.     

Empowering Leadership and Municipal Service Delivery: A Case Study of a Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa

Since municipal service delivery is a challenge facing many municipalities in South Africa, this paper reports on a study conducted among a convenience sample of managers and employees from the Revenue and Customer Relations Management department of a major metropolitan municipality in South Africa, to address the aforementioned problem. The findings reveal that empowering leadership is strongly correlated with employee work effort, performance and improved service delivery. On the practitioners’ side, the important mediating role of employee work effort and employee performance in the “empowering leadership–improved service delivery” relationship in South Africa’s public sector is also highlighted.     

New Public Management Reforms in the Italian Universities: Managerial Tools,Accountability Mechanisms or Simply Compliance?

Since 2009, a cross-sectorial reform based on the New Public Management (NPM) principles introduced a performance management system in Italian universities. On the basis of the analysis of the documents regarding the performance management system produced by 60 public Italian universities as a result of the reform implementation, the paper investigates the performance management tools in relation to both completeness and use of them. The analysis highlights that the universities have implemented performance management tools in an unstructured and nonhomogeneous way. This allows formulation of hypotheses on the main determinants of this unsatisfactory result.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Exploring the Complexities of Performance Management

ABSTRACT

The editors of this symposium hope that this collection of articles can help advance the public administration literature stream across the multiple organizational and cultural settings in which these performance management studies were conducted. However, this symposium also focused on articles that can help advance the practice of performance management, where specific recommendations are needed to help public officials collect, analyze, and use meaningful outcome measures specifically for the benefits for making better management and policy decisions.