A local view of performance measurement: Feedback, control, and accountability in welfare to work activities in New York State

A study focused on performance measurement in public sector activity and its role as feedback for management control and policy accountability. The underlying proposition is that administrative practice in the field of Public Administration is moving toward management control that is becoming less hierarchical, centralized, and ex ante, and becoming more collaborative, decentralized, and ex post facto. This potentially leads to new forms of performance measurement and management that create tensions with policy accountability. Such tensions stem from the fact that resource and political accountability flow in a hierarchical fashion while much of performance flows laterally.;In order to examine the validity of this proposition, the policy area of welfare to work activities at the local level in New York State (exclusive of New York City) was selected as the basis of investigation. In New York, county government has long played a major role in the administration of welfare programs and has shared non-federal costs with state government.;The study incorporates a statewide mail survey (63.2% response rate) of social services administrators in the 57 social services districts, followed up by interviews of social services administrators and policy makers in selected counties. These inquiries focused on obtaining qualitative data about the current status, understandings, and future direction of performance measurement at the local level in welfare to work activity.;The results from this study are mixed. While the survey data indicated that results-oriented performance measures were extensively used at the local level, this was not supported by field interviews. Clearly social services administrators possess knowledge about the theoretical value of results-oriented performance measures for control and evaluation purposes. These administrators also have a strong sense of apprehension about the possible misuses of results-oriented measurement concepts to assess organizational performance. Given the long-standing tenure of social services administrators and service providers at the local level and the resulting long-standing relationships and trust among these actors, informal methods of assessing performance based on trust relationships are preferred to formal measurement systems.