Child Welfare’s Iron Cage: Managing Performance in New Zealand’s Child Welfare Agency

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explain the performance management practice in use within one of New Zealand's public service agencies – Child, Youth and Family Services. These practices are described with reference to New Zealand's formal model of public sector management and the professional social work model understood by the majority of the agency's staff. The paper draws on recent research into performance management practices in nine of New Zealand's public service agencies that included Child, Youth and Family Services. This involved a number of semi-structured interviews with managers and staff from the national, regional and local levels of each agency together with a review of relevant documentation. It is argued that performance management practices exist on a continuum representing the of which extends from a regulative control model of rules and fixed targets to one that is more reliant on shared understandings, learning and flexible targets. It is further suggested that the institutional structures underlying this continuum determines the extent to which performance management practices within individual agencies are loosely coupled with those used for purposes of external accountability. The paper highlights the tension that exists in an organisation that encompasses the substantive logic of “a values based profession” (Ronnau, 2001) but which is bound by the formal rationality implicit in its system of external accountability that, it has been claimed, “reduces a complex reality to something simplistic and one dimensional” (Tilbury, 2004). It, therefore, argues that the formal model of performance measurement and management of the public service should encompass the broader information and rationality used by managers within public service agencies.