Performance measurement is not an end in itself. So why should public managers measure performance? Because they may find such measures helpful in achieving eight specific managerial purposes. As part of their overall management strategy, public managers can use performance measures to evaluate, control, budget, motivate, promote, celebrate, learn, and improve. Unfortunately, no single performance measure is appropriate for all eight purposes. Consequently, public managers should not seek the one magic performance measure. Instead, they need to think seriously about the managerial purposes to which performance measurement might contribute and how they might deploy these measures. Only then can they select measures with the characteristics necessary to help achieve each purpose. Without at least a tentative theory about how performance measures can be employed to foster improvement (which is the core purpose behind the other seven), public managers will be unable to decide what should be measured. Everyone is measuring performance. 1 Public managers are measuring the performance of their organizations, their contractors, and the collaboratives in which they participate. Congress, state legislatures, and city councils are insisting that executive-branch agencies periodically report measures of performance. Stakeholder organizations want performance measures so they can hold government accountable. Journalists like nothing better than a front-page bar chart that compares performance measures for various jurisdictions—whether they are average test scores for the city’s schools or FBI uniform crime statistics for the state’s cities. Moreover, public agencies are taking the initiative to publish compilations of their own performance mea

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Why Measure Performance? Different Purposes Require Different Measures

This article tests the hypothesis that postwar affluence led to an intergenerational shift from Materialist to Post-Materialist values among Western publics, and analyzes the consequences of the economic uncertainty prevailing since 1973. The young emphasize Post-Materialist values more than the old. Time-series data indicate that this reflects generational change far more than aging effects, but that the recession of the mid-1970s also produced significant period effects. As Post-Materialists aged, they moved out of the student ghetto and became a predominant influence among young technocrats, contributing to the rise of a “New Class.” They furnish the ideologues and core support for the environmental, zero-growth and antinuclear movements; and their opposition to those who give top priority to reindustrialization and rearmament constitutes a distinctive and persisting dimension of political cleavage.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S000305540018116X

Post-Materialism in an Environment of Insecurity

1 Introduction.- 2 The Concept of Happiness.- 2/1 The various meanings of the word happiness.- 2/2 Happiness defined.- 2/3 Components of happiness.- 2/4 Adjacent concepts.- 2/5 Synonyms of happiness.- 2/6 Summary.- 3 Can Happiness be Measured?.- 3/1 Validity problems.- 3/2 Reliability problems.- 3/3 Problems of comparison.- 3/4 Summary.- 4 Indicators of Happiness.- 4/1 Indicators of overall happiness.- 4/1.1 Direct questions.- 4/1.2 Indirect questions.- 4/1.3 Ratings by others.- 4/2 Indicators of hedonic level of affect.- 4/2.1 Direct questions.- 4/2.2 Indirect questions.- 4/2.3 Ratings by others.- 4/3 Indicators of contentment.- 4/4 Composites.- 4/5 Do the three kinds of indicators tap different phenomena?.- 4/6 Summary.- 5 Gathering the Available Data.- 5/1 Searching empirical happiness studies.- 5/2 The studies found.- 5/3 Presenting the findings.- 5/4 Limitations of the data.- 5/5 Summary.- 6 Happiness and Living Conditions.- 6/1 Happiness and society.- 6/1.1 Economic conditions.- 6/1.2 Political conditions.- 6/1.3 Peace and war.- 6/1.4 Some regional differences in happiness.- 6/2 Happiness and one's place in society.- 6/2.1 Gender.- 6/2.2 Age-differences.- 6/2.3 Minority status.- 6/2.4 Income.- 6/2.5 Education.- 6/2.6 Occupational prestige.- 6/2.7 Global social rank.- 6/3 Happiness and work.- 6/3.1 Having a job or not.- 6/3.2 Occupation.- 6/3.3 Voluntary work.- 6/4 Happiness and intimate ties.- 6/4.1 Marriage.- 6/4.2 Children.- 6/4.3 Friends and relatives.- 6/5 Summary.- 7 Happiness and Individual Characteristics.- 7/1 Happiness and personal resources.- 7/1.1 Physical health.- 7/1.2 General mental effectiveness.- 7/1.3 Specific abilities.- 7/1.4 Activity level.- 7/1.5 Richness of mental life.- 7/2 Happiness and some personality traits.- 7/2.1 Perceived fate control.- 7/2.2 Defensive strategies.- 7/2.3 Tendencies to like things.- 7/2.4 Time orientation.- 7/3 Happiness and lifestyle.- 7/4 Happiness and longings.- 7/5 Happiness and convictions.- 7/5.1 Happiness and ethical values.- 7/5.2 Religion.- 7/5.3 (Un)-conventionality of outlook.- 7/5.4 Views on happiness.- 7/6 Happiness and appreciations.- 7/6.1 Appreciation of oneself.- 7/6.2 Appreciation of other people.- 7/6.3 Appreciation of society.- 7/6.4 Appreciation of one's social position.- 7/6.5 Appreciation of one's work.- 7/6.6 Appreciation of leisure.- 7/6.7 Appreciation of one's living environment.- 7/6.8 Appreciation of one's health.- 7/6.9 Which global life-aspect-satisfactions are most closely related to happiness?.- 7/7 Summary.- 8 Antecedents of Happiness.- 8/1 Happiness and earlier living conditions.- 8/1.1 Conditions in youth.- 8/1.2 Earlier conditions in adulthood.- 8/2 Happiness and earlier personal characteristics.- 8/3 Summary.- 9 Conclusions.- 9/1 Conditions of happiness.- 9/1.1 Which correlates represent causes?.- 9/1.2 Variations in correlations.- 9/1.3 The correlates in context.- 9/1.4 Some lines for further research.- 9/2 Myths about happiness.- 9/2.1 The myth that modern western society is a sink of unhappiness.- 9/2.2 Myths about things that make for happiness in western societies.- 9/2.3 The myth that living conditions do not matter.- 9/2.4 The myth that happiness is not a significant matter.- References.- Author index.

Conditions for Happiness

In this paper, subjective well being, as measured by survey questions on happiness and life satisfaction, is investigated from a sociological-comparative point of view. The central thesis is that happiness and satisfaction must be understood as the outcome of an interaction process between individual characteristics and aspirations on the one side, and social relations and macrosocial structures on the other side. A distinction is made between life satisfaction and happiness; the former is more seen as the outcome of an evaluation process including material and social aspirations and achievements, the latter as an outcome of positive experiences, particularly close personal relationships. The focus of this paper is on micro- and macrosocial conditions favouring or inhibiting the emergence of happiness and satisfaction. It is hypothesized that dense and good basic social relations, occupational involvement and success, sociocultural (religious and altruistic) orientations and participation are conducive to happiness and life satisfaction; the same should be true at the macrolevel for economic prosperity, relatively equal social structures, a well-established welfare state and political democracy. The latter conditions, however, should be more important for life satisfaction than for happiness. A comparative, multilevel regression analysis of happiness in 41 nations around the world is carried out (using the World Value Survey 1995–1997). Both our general assumption and most of the specific hypotheses could be confirmed. It turned very clearly that “happiness” and “life satisfaction” are two different concepts. It could be shown that microsocial embedding and sociocultural integration of a person are highly relevant for happiness. However, contrary to earlier studies, we find that macrosocial factors like the economic wealth of nation, the distribution of income, the extent of the welfare state and political freedom are also relevant, particularly for satisfaction. What counts most is the ability to cope with life, including subjective health and financial satisfaction, close social relations, and the economic perspectives for improvement in the future, both at the level of the individual and at that of the society. These abilities are certainly improved by favourable macrosocial conditions and institutions, such as a more equal income distribution, political democracy and a welfare state.

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How social relations and structures can produce happiness and unhappiness: An international comparative analysis.

List of figures List of tables Foreword Vito Tanzi 1. The shadow economy: a challenge for economic and social policy 2. Defining the shadow economy 3. Methods to estimate the size of the shadow economy 4. Size of shadow economies around the world 5. The size of the shadow economy labour force 6. An integrated approach to explain deviant behaviour 7. Analysing the causes and measures of economic policy 8. Effects of the increasing shadow economy 9. The 'two-pillar strategy' 10. Conclusion and outlook List of references Index.

The Shadow Economy: An International Survey

Given the prevailing emphasis on agency performance, customer focus, stakeholder’s interests and other methods of assessment under new public administration and prevailing managerialism in many public sectors around the world, administrative practitioners have taken to benchmarking as an instrument for assessing organizational performance and for facilitating management transfer and learning from other benchmarked organizations. The introduction of benchmarking into the public sector is still in its early stages. Technical problems, scepticism about usefulness and the appropriateness of transferring putative private sector competencies into public administration and the resistance in accepting organizational change as a necessary consequence of benchmarking exercises in the public sector, prevent the widespread acceptance and use of benchmarking in public sectors, arguably “punch‐drunk” with systemic change. Nevertheless, there are some encouraging examples of benchmarking within the public sector. This paper critically analyzes these examples in order to establish the vulnerability points of such measurement instruments which, possibly, need more research in order to establish the specific learning dimensions to benchmarking and to illustrate the importance of such benchmarking and learning within the highly risky, information technology (IT)‐driven experiences of systems development and failure.

Benchmarking and performance measurement in public sectors

Wertwandel und gesellschaftlicher Wandel

Werte und Wandel : Ergebnisse und Methoden einer Forschungstradition

Traditionsbruch als Herausforderung : Perspektiven der Wertewandelsgesellschaft

Wertstrukturen und Wertwandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland : Grundlagen einer interdisziplinären empirischen Wertforschung mit einer Sekundäranalyse von Umfragedaten

Helmut Klages

Papers

Benchmarking and performance measurement in public sectors

Wertwandel und gesellschaftlicher Wandel

Werte und Wandel : Ergebnisse und Methoden einer Forschungstradition

Traditionsbruch als Herausforderung : Perspektiven der Wertewandelsgesellschaft

Wertstrukturen und Wertwandel in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland : Grundlagen einer interdisziplinären empirischen Wertforschung mit einer Sekundäranalyse von Umfragedaten