Speaking Like Statesmen or Scientists: Differentiating Congressional and Administrative Views on Data

ABSTRACT

Do legislators and executives speak of data the same way when speaking about public sector data? Public management scholarship and public performance policies often emphasize data-driven decision making as the path to making government efficient and effective. Whether the public policy makers mean the same thing when they speak about data in discussions of data-driven performance and decision making is unknown. In this article, the authors present an analysis of the language of data in conversations about government performance. Two frameworks are identified for the role of data in public performance—the statesman’s and the scientist’s. A corpus-level analysis of over 30 years of government documents is used to demonstrate the differences between these two approaches. This research builds consciously on the work of previous scholars seeking to map the nuances of data-driven performance management policies in the U.S. federal government.     

Interorganizational Collaborations for Humanitarian Aid: An Analysis of Partnership,Community, and Single Organization Outcomes

Abstract

This article explores collaborative activities across organizational and sectoral boundaries. Interorganizational collaborations are an increasingly common setup to address societal needs; however, current research lacks insights into such collaborations and their outcomes. This study contributes to the existing literature by assessing empirically perceptions of interorganizational collaboration outcomes, considering different dimensions that should be measured when planning and performing tasks of social interest. The article is set in the context of disaster relief, where actors from different humanitarian relief organizations within the public and nonprofit sector engage in collaborative activities. I describe how interorganizational collaborations create outcomes for (1) the partnership structure that is established, (2) single organizational members involved in the collaborative activity, and (3) the community targeted by the interorganizational operation.     

‘The dead are coming’: acts of citizenship at Europe’s borders

This article combines the research agenda of the acts of citizenship literature with reflections on emancipatory theatre. I examine the Centre for Political Beauty’s activity-based artwork ‘The dead are coming’ which problematizes the cruelties of the European border regime in symbolically charged spaces in the German public. Focusing particularly on the roles available to ‘actors’ and ‘spectators’, and the directionality of the message conveyed through the artwork, I examine how the performance subverts the ‘sites’ and ‘scales’ of citizenship. My analysis indicates that the artwork’s subversive potential emerges not only from the political vision conveyed by the artist collective, but also from the way in which others become involved in the performance. Acts of political beauty thus most extensively challenge instituted citizenship’s orientalist anchoring, reverse status-based role allocations and subvert the structural violence of borders when the performance enables the enactment of novel forms of political agency and solidarity.     

Intervention Theatre: performance,authenticity and expert knowledge in politicians’ travel to post-/conflict spaces

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of official travel activities by politicians to post-/conflict spaces in German foreign policymaking. Starting from the observation that official travel justifications stress the value of authentic insights and unfiltered information, while journeys in practice are meticulously planned and staged, it asks what kind of knowing is possible, how actors make sense of the staged nature of field trips, and how multiple performances create and/or undermine notions of authenticity and first-hand expertise. The article shows that official on-site visits are composed of multiple conscious performances by all actors involved, but that these performances do not undermine the notions of authenticity and expertise. On the contrary, knowledge authenticity—or truth claims on the basis of authentic insights—and related expert authority are produced through travel-as-performance. The emphasis policymakers put on on-site presence and (the performance of) localized knowledge contradicts intervention literature’s generalized finding of a prioritization of technocratic over localized knowledge. The article draws on politics and performance scholarship and authenticity theories in tourism studies to make sense of a wealth of empirical material on the claims, practice and functions of German MPs’ journeys to post-/conflict spaces as part of broader political struggles over policy knowledge.     

Small Countries,Big Performers: In Search of Shared Strategic Public Sector HRM Practices in Successful Small Countries

This article compares strategic public sector HRM practices between 10 small countries that have consistently shown extraordinary economic, social, and governance performance. The fact that these small countries, which are traditionally considered to be disadvantaged, have become benchmarks of good government suggests they have uniquely maximized and leveraged their key resource: people. In search of novel lessons, we assess through secondary data how their public sectors have organized and institutionalized four key HRM activities: 1) selection, 2) appraisal, 3) training, and 4) compensation, and whether they engage in strategic, centralized efforts to architect and “bundle” these activities. Our exploratory case study findings show that these high performing countries employ various integrated efforts to attract the best and brightest into their public sectors, and train and reward them well, although they differ in terms of their centralization dynamics. We conclude our article with seven propositions for future research and implications for emerging small countries.     

The Design and Execution of Performance Management Systems at State Level: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Malaysia

This comparative study analyses the experience of Italy and Malaysia in the design and execution of performance management systems at the state level. The article investigates how performance management systems have changed over the past decades, the motivations behind their metamorphoses, their common elements across the two countries, and what accounts for the respective progress. It also investigates the role that the institutional framework plays in making performance management systems robust. The study presents policy recommendations on how governments can create more robust performance management systems for enhanced accountability and transparency in an age of resource constraint.     

Performance Implications of Public Managers’ Goal Prioritization: An Empirical Test of the Link between Internal Management and Organizational Performance

Most studies on the goals-performance nexus focus on the implications of goal design. In public organizations with multiple goals, managerial goal prioritization can, however, in itself play a decisive role for performance. This study examines the effects of managerial goal prioritization and employee commitment on organizational performance. Analyses of parallel surveys of principals and teachers in higher secondary education and archival data on school performance show that principals’ goal prioritization is positively related to high school performance. The findings thus indicate that public managers should concentrate not only on how they design goals, but also on how they prioritize them.     

Applying a Dynamic Performance Management Framework to Wicked Issues: How Coproduction Helps to Transform Young People’s Services in Surrey County Council,UK

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a dynamic performance management (DPM) approach can give policy makers a more integrated, time-related understanding of how to address wicked problems successfully. The article highlights how an outcome-based approach to solving wicked policy problems has to balance three very contrasting objectives of stakeholders in the policy making process – improving service quality, improving quality of life outcomes and improving conformity to the principles of public governance. Simultaneous achievement of these three objectives may not be feasible, as they may form an interactive dynamic system. However the balancing act between them may be achieved by the use of DPM. Policy insights from this novel approach are illustrated through a case study of a highly successful co-production intervention to help young people with multiple disadvantages in Surrey, UK. The implications of DPM are that policy development needs to accept the important roles of emergent strategy and learning mechanisms, rather than attempting ‘blueprint’ strategic planning and control mechanisms. Some expectations about the results may indeed be justifiable in particular policy systems, as clustering of quality of life outcomes and outcomes in the achievement of governance principles is likely, because behaviours are strongly inter-related. However, this clustering can never be taken for granted but must be tested in each specific policy context. Undertaking simulations with the model and recalibrating it through time, as experience builds up, may allow learning in relation to overcoming barriers to achieving outcomes in the system.     

Black geographies of struggle and pleasure in Nona Faustine’s White Shoes

In Nona Faustine’s photo series of self-portraits, White Shoes, the artist’s body becomes the agent in exposing the instability of racialized historical geography. Faustine revisits New York City’s landmarks to address what is missing or made invisible: a slave ship, a fugitive woman’s rebirth, or African burial grounds. Making herself visible where she is supposed to remain invisible, she highlights the unacknowledged connection between national wealth, nationalism, geography, and black labor. She discloses the topography of her travels as a changeable terrain, where one slips from the national iconic to ambiguous and finally, to the sacred. I suggest that Faustine doesn’t seek to democratize the extant historical maps, but to shift the terms of reading the city’s geography. She lifts the boundaries between the polarized pathways of knowing – the secularized and the sacred, the living and the dead, the verifiable and the missing. This shift is also made possible by the medium of photography and a feminist turn towards pleasures in one’s body. As Faustine comes to terms with the psychic and cultural inheritance of the diaspora, she moves from the collective body of pain towards black women’s pleasure in their own bodies without purging the history of sexual trauma.     

Calling Local/Talking Global: the cosmo-politics of the call-center industry

In 2015, pioneering Saudi vlogger Juju Sajer revealed her face on YouTube after three years of performing in relative invisibility. She used her beauty vlog for small family dramas as well as beauty advice, translating the global genre to stage Saudi womanhood in modest and modern ways. This article analyses Juju’s use of digital frames as material for building a representational apparatus for young Saudi women. It takes a posthumanist approach to media roles as materially entangled with apparatuses of production, attending to the performer’s construction of networks and her onscreen performances. Juju’s evolving role from beauty vlogger to proto-talk show host, accompanied her increasing control over means of digital production after she gained corporate sponsorship and put her face on her brand. In contrast to theorists of communicative capitalism, I examine Juju’s self-branding as a networked performance of self, which enlivened and extended representational repertoires for young Saudi women. As a niche YouTube channel, it shows the potential of digital performance repertoires to develop within a framework of gendered modesty.