Performing The State

Performance measurement is now a key management tool used by government to assess and enhance public services. It is also used as a tool for public sector transparency and accountability. Despite these noble objectives, performance measurement can also generate counterproductive and sometimes paradoxical outcomes. This book innovatively conceptualises performance measurement as a ‘policy instrument’. Such an approach necessarily invites careful and critical examination of instances of the formation, application and contestation of particular performance measurement regimes, the tools used to measure performance, the way in which performance data is produced and used, and the complex dynamics between professionals, managers and service users that arise from these practices. The book provides detailed empirical examples of performance measurement in the delivery of health, schooling and child welfare services, as well as the problematics of assessing national wellbeing. Instead of a form of scientific and rational management, performance measurement is revealed as an intrinsically contested, socio-politically charged and value laden practice. The book concludes that to succeed in delivering authentic performance improvements public sector managers must be aware of these complex, paradoxical dynamics and the circumstances that make performance measurement perform. This book was originally published as a special issue of Policy Studies.

In a recent international comparative study, the United States public schools did not fare well with the rest of the world. To the disappointment of many, the No Child Left Behind law did little to improve student achievement. Nevertheless, a small pocket of poverty schools worked against the odds of limited resources and performed to new heights of academic excellence. These high-poverty, high-performing schools were studied to identify the common trends and to reveal their secrets of success. The secrets include a unique combination of leadership, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and evaluation. Can the high-poverty, high-performing schools be the success model of our next generation schools? As concerned citizens and stakeholders of education, we need to find out how our country can get back on track to become an educational leader again so we may compete in the fierce global economy.

During the 1970s a wave of ‘counter-culture’ people moved into rural communities in many parts of Australia. This study focuses in particular on the town of Kuranda in North Queensland and the relationship between the settlers and the local Aboriginal population, concentrating on a number of linked social dramas that portrayed the use of both public and private space. Through their public performances and in their everyday spatial encounters, these people resisted the bureaucratic state but, in the process, they also contributed to the cultivation and propagation of state effects.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Serv. (CMS) established the Special Focus Facility (SFF) Program to help address poor nursing home performance. States select a subset of homes as SFFs from a list of the 15 poorest performing homes in each state. States survey SFFs twice as frequently as other homes and there are more robust enforcement, including termination, for SFFs that fail to improve within about 18 months. This report: (1) determined the factors states consider in selecting SFFs and how SFFs differed from other nursing homes; (2) evaluated CMS regional office and state adherence to program guidance and the program's impact on homes' performance; and (3) identified other strategies that were used to improve poorly performing homes.

Ultimately, the authors recommend that states create new ways of helping colleges with many at-risk students, define performance indicators and measures better tailored to institutional missions, and improve the capacity of colleges to engage in organizational learning.

This book discusses what it means to “perform the State,” what this action means in relation to the country of Iran and how these various performances are represented. The concept of the “State” as a modern phenomenon has had a powerful impact on the formation of the individual and collective, as well as on determining how political entities are perceived in their interactions with one another in the current global arena.

Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provide a unique perspective on how politics is performed in everyday life.