Agencies evaluate what is measurable rather than what clients get.

Evidence

Organizations tend to measure what they can readily quantify without intruding on workers’ interaction with clients. Organizational attention focuses on two major considerations. First, a great deal of attention is paid to the way the worker spends his or her time. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter claim that rule proliferation paradoxically expands frontline discretion — surrogate measures substitute for direct quality assessment for the same non-intrusiveness reason. — connects to: Mass-processing management displaces the client-orientation goals that justify agencies.; Surrogate performance measures entrench incumbents and block reform through the reward structure — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1638; Utilitarian evaluation judges expected rather than actual consequences. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 223 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Governance now leads with metrics to produce the practices rather than measuring established ones. #expands (0.88) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 601
• Evaluation procedures produce the value they claim to measure. #expands (0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 427
• Utilitarian evaluation judges expected rather than actual consequences. #expands (0.82) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 223
• Analysts substitute the measurable question of relative strength for the relevant one of sufficiency #exemplifies (0.80)
• Agencies under budget threat inflate client numbers to prove worth #exemplifies (0.75)
• Measured data can challenge subjective impressions because conditions differ #contradicts (0.75) — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 1082