CALL FOR PAPER
ITALIAN ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT (BICENTENARY CONFERENCE)
DEADLINE: APRIL, 6 2013
Theme:Public Management. Organizational and Inter-Institutional performance management in Public
Administration for sustainable growth (in collaboration with " International Journal of Public
Administration") Performance management is still an evolving topic in both research and practice. The
critical issues related to the design and implementation of formal performance management systems
are measuring organizational results, producing information for more informed decision-making, and
promoting process improvement. The ambiguity of performance management in the public sector is
still a disputed topic, particularly when the evaluation of outcome performance measures and the
sustainability of community policies are considered. The traditional domain of performance
management is focused on an organizational sphere, implying that achieved results are primarily
assessed in relation to the effects produced by decision makers on their own institutions. Setting
outcome performance measures in such context often implies difficulties in framing the effects of the
administrative processes carried out by an agency on the wider system (i.e., on public service users,
the community, and the territory). This phenomenon has been seen as a major cause of myopia in
measuring and managing performance on an organizational level. When an inter-institutional
systems perspective is adopted, assessing performance sustainability requires a focus on the single
organizations results and on how such results contribute to the wider systems performance. Inside
such a wider system, each organization can build or share a given endowment of strategic resources.
Both the aggregate performance of a territory and the specific performance of each organization
inside it are significantly affected by the accumulation and depletion processes of social capital and
other strategic resources (e.g. infrastructures, image). This perspective implies that performance is
assessed in relation to the effects produced by decision makers on the region or territory to which
their organization belongs. In such context, the inter-institutional systems performance does not
result from a mere sum of the performance levels produced by each single institution. It is, rather, the
effect of the net of relationships and synergies between the different institutions linked each other.
Therefore, this call for proposals focuses on the following research questions: How can performance
management systems allow public sector institutions support the design and implementation of
sustainable policies in the long-run and how can the design and implementation of performance
management systems contribute to this new frontier of knowledge and practice in the public sector
in order to foster sustainable growth.
MORE ON:
http://www.aidea2013.it/default.php?trackname=info-general-english
Best regards,
emanuele