Goals versus institutions: the development of performance measurement in the Swedish university sector

This paper contrasts goal-directed and institutional approaches to the development of performance measurement (PM) in the Swedish university sector, which has been subject to increasing emphasis on management by objectives since the early 1990s. We adopt a macro perspective, focusing on recent changes in PM related to governmental control of universities and colleges and combine an extensive review of archival data with interviews in our empirical analysis. It is concluded that although the goal-directed model cannot be completely rejected as a heuristic informing recent changes in PM, a process-orientated institutional perspective considerably enriches the analysis by making it less static and more contextually informed. In particular, the latter perspective better explains the evolution of loose couplings between formally stated goals and performance indicators and between different systems for PM by directing attention to the complex interplay between conflicting constituent interests in the evolution of resource and cost allocation practices and quality control procedures. However, our empirical analysis also leads us to reconsider the conceptions of loose coupling as either a “given” feature of institutionalised organizations or an outcome of more pro-active resistance at the micro level prevailing in much earlier work in institutional theory.