Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

This sandwich position became tangible in the introduction of performance measurements,
integrated management, vertical job differentiation, budgets and audits, as to
improve efficiency and account for public expenditure. It is believed that these management
instruments will improve the overall results of an organization. They belong
to the philosophy of New Public Management (Karp and Helgø, 2008). However,
professionals experience it as a way of introducing top down control, a token of their
disqualification and a lot of bureaucratic hassle (Commissie Dijsselbloem, 2008; Commissie
Leraren, 2007).
I never started to believe that planning and control could be the essential inspiration
for professionals to develop themselves and to invest in the organization. Planning and
control is an engineering approach of an organizational reality in which employees are
seen as unities which easily reprogram themselves to adapt to new policies. In a
column for the journal of the UAS I had given an early warning not to trust on this supposed
self-programming. Realizing a new policy is a complicated thing.
Managing appeared to be navigating in an extensive field of interactions which all
have a temporarily and shifting outcome. I tried to be a manager who wanted to
inspire colleagues to undertake something new and to take some risks. I was busy
tinkering on the organization by observing what happened, by creating patterns and
relations among colleagues. Engagement was accomplished because of the partly
unstructured way of working together and the joint possibility of reviewing concepts,
methods and targets during the projects. I learned to have confidence in my colleagues
and to plan and manage within broad perspectives.
Acting this way always felt as accomplishing something together with the team which
at the very same moment I could not grasp. Working together took place intuitively, it
inspired us and we cultivated better teams and an organization. What made it successful
was not fully explainable. We evaluated on the basis of principles like responsibility,
performance, teamwork and engagement but the evaluations were not the decisive
thing. At the end I presented myself as a social constructionist, as someone who
understands that an organization is the ongoing result of many spiders who weave in
their own web in their own way. The webs sticking together is what we call an organization
(Bruijns et al., 2004; Simon, 2004).
My self-presentation as a social constructionist was a bit of an idealized description of
our efforts in the faculty to improve our courses and to obtain a higher position on the
ranking lists of Dutch Higher Education. In reality it also had been hard work on settling
discussions and heated debates about a lot of opinions of a lot of different persons.
Sometimes colleagues had to be forced to comply with the innovation undertaken.
Changing old and developing new default assumptions is an intensive business.
I realize that my style of management was a convergence of my philosophical notions,
a strong reaction on my experiences with former management, the fact that I had to
manage colleagues and my personal opinions about authority.
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