Performance Measurement and Management

This chapter reports and discusses data from interviews with university-based historians and physicists in Australia on performance measurement. We consider how they see accountability today, what they perceive as having changed in their institutional contexts and what kinds of effects new forms of performance assessment are having. The major change noted by all is the proliferation of metrics as measures of performance, and the greater use of these for assessment purposes outside the specific department level. Both physicists and historians were concerned that such measures were prone to distortions, and produced some incentives to focus on what is fashionable or less risky, and on strategies to produce greater publication quantity rather than quality. Research performance assessment apparently carries more weight than teaching quality assessment, and is interpreted as tacitly providing an incentive to reduce time spent on teaching compared with research. There appears to be some current variation across Australian universities in the extent to which performance assessment is consequential and the extent to which it appears to be primarily ceremonial.