The Cult of Modernity

This article examines Strategic Performance Management Systems oftenintroduced as a key component of New Public Management. In doing so, it identifies some of the common and long-standing difficulties identified with the introduction and use of performance measures. The article then questions why such management systems are consistently advocated given some of the apparently serious dysfunctions that their introduction and use can engender. It concludes that these systems reflect a deeper attachment to what has been characterised as Enlightenment thinking, and that an archaeology of this style of thought is a necessary pre-requisite for understanding models of management that are promulgated.