Abstract
Performance management experienced a revolution in the 1980s, which is still in action. Several academics stressed the need for more research in the performance management field in order to put forward comprehensive frameworks, which are suitable to cope with high levels of uncertainty, as in the present economic environment. Nonetheless the empirical findings on the effectiveness of the extant performance management frameworks demonstrated that they are still partial and problematic. This Chapter introduces the concept of ‘loose coupling’ in the performance management literature and provides an overview of the contents of the book.
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Notes
- 1.
By stressing the need for a change in management control system, Scott and Walsham stated that “[t]op-down control-oriented logic is ill-suited to the dynamism of risk in a knowledge society, which resists containment and instead demands active management” (Scott and Welsham 2005: 310).
- 2.
The shift from financial to non-financial concerns in most performance measurement systems, which arose beginning in the late 1980s, has been called a “revolution” by Robert Eccles in his Harvard Business Review paper, “The performance measurement manifesto” (1991: 131). Later, Andy Neely adopted this approach and conducted a study on the “Performance measurement revolution”, analysing both causes and consequences (Neely 1999).
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Demartini, C. (2014). Introduction. In: Performance Management Systems. Contributions to Management Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36684-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-36684-0_1
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