Ambiguous societal goals make street-level performance measurement nearly arbitrary

Evidence

Goal ambiguity, intrinsic to street-level bureaucracies, affects performance measurement. Such goals as developing a well-educated citizenry or securing public safety are ephemeral. But putting these general goals into operation is a practical matter, since we evaluate achievement in terms of goals. As we have seen, there is no agreement in society about objectives of public education and public safety forces. How then to operationalize ambiguous objectives? The extraordinary attention practitioners and theorists in public administration recently have placed on clarifying organizational objectives testifies as well as anything to the general importance of goal clarity Still another reason that street-level bureaucrats’ performance often eludes effective evaluation is that there are too many variables to take into account to make evaluation realistic. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 388

Categorization

• QUESTION: If goals are unoperationalizable, how do stereotypes get selected as the operative measuring rod? Worth chasing how discretion fills the evaluation vacuum.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Ambiguous goals make some public jobs impossible to do properly by any standard — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 262; Missing counterfactuals make outcome-based evaluation of street-level programs impossible — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 390; Performance targets distort actual work toward what is measured — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 93 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Performance targets distort actual work toward what is measured #expands (0.80) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 93
• Optimizing for stated goals produces monstrous outcomes #expands (0.75) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 655
• Goals change behavior only when paired with performance feedback. #complicates (0.75)
• Rational players cannot opt out of social coordination when efficiency requires it #qualifies (0.70) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 370