The Roles of performance measurement in the English public sector

Despite the significant volume of research that has been conducted to date in the field of public sector performance measurement, there is a relative paucity of empirical research that describes in detail the systems and processes being used at different levels of government to measure and manage performance. Furthermore, academics in the performance measurement field tend to adopt either a pragmatic perspective or a more theoretical stance. Rarely do authors appear to provide a firm theoretical grounding to shed light on their more practical findings. Therefore, the researchers decided to carry out a wide project on the roles of performance measurement in the English public sector, adopting three organization theories – agency, institutional and resource dependence theory. The research consists of two main phases. Initially, two exploratory cases were carried out in a police force and primary care trust. Following the findings of the first phase, the authors performed several pilot interviews and set out to carry out multiple holistic case studies to complete their research. This paper presents and discusses in depth the first phase of the research, and the methodology the authors decided to adopt in the second