Marshall W. Meyer

Performance measurement remains a vexing problem for business firms and other kinds of organisations. This book explains why: the performance we want to measure (long-term cash flows, long-term viability) and the performance we can measure (current cash flows, customer satisfaction, etc.) are not the same. The 'balanced scorecard', which has been widely adopted by US firms, does not solve these underlying problems of performance measurement and may exacerbate them because it provides no guidance on how to combine dissimilar measures into an overall appraisal of performance. A measurement technique called activity-based profitability analysis (ABPA) is suggested as a partial solution, especially to the problem of combining dissimilar measures. ABPA estimates the revenue consequences of each activity performed for the customer, allowing firms to compare revenues with costs for these activities and hence to discriminate between activities that are ultimately profitable and those that are not.

Beyond the Balanced Scorecard

Rethinking Performance Measurement

Peter Michael Blau

Bureaucracy in Modern Society

Michael T. Hannan

John H. Freeman

Environments and Organizations

Lynne G. Zucker

In this volume, the authors closely examine performance and draw on both sociology and economics to explain why some organizations perform well and others perform badly. They first separate the concept of organizational performance from that of organizational persistence. Then they develop a provocative theory of why - and how - organizations tend towards failure and how they survive in spite of it. Meyer and Zucker contend that management plays a critical role in the movement towards or away from poor performance, yet persistence is determined by the often competing interests of owners, managers, workers and the public.

Permanently Failing Organizations

Marshall W. Meyer

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