Hitting the Target and Missing the Point? Developing an Understanding of Organizational Gaming

Abstract

Public services are by their nature complex (Moore, 2002), involving a large number of stakeholders. As a result, the number of public sector performance measures can quickly rise in order to reflect this complexity and to be accountable to the various stakeholders. Hood gives an example of the Health Department in England, where ten top-level targets “were translated into some 300 lower-level targets for various public sector health-delivery organizations” (2006: 515). In many countries we have seen a rapid proliferation of policies introducing performance indicators and targets in all areas of the public service sector, from local and central government to education, health and community care.