The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

12Public Sector Communication and Performance Management: Drawing Inferences from Public Performance Numbers

Asmus Leth Olsen

Introduction

In the late 1930s, a young Herbert Simon was fundamentally curious about how the measurement of the performance of public organizations could be useful to managers and citizens. In an almost forgotten piece from 1939, The Administrator in Search of Statistics, he asks a set of simple questions about the role of performance information in the public sector: “What are statistics, and how can they help solve administrative problems? What is the proper use of statistics, and what pitfalls are to be avoided?” (Simon, 1939, p. 21). While Simon moved on to other topics and was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, his early endeavors focused on the effects of performance information have been revitalized in recent decades by the performance management doctrine (Pollitt, 2006). Moynihan (2008, p. 5) defines performance management as “a system that generates performance information through strategic planning and performance measurement routines and that connects this information to decision venues, where, ideally, the information influences a range of possible decisions.” In performance management, performance information is intended to play a role in multiple areas—for example, evaluating actions, allocating resources, learning, and improving decision‐making and accountability (Askim, 2007; Holzer & Yang, 2004). To date, meta‐analytical efforts ...