Vibrant materialities in the ‘doing’ of performance measurement: A field-study of an international development NGO

Accounting and Management Control

Speaker: Roel Boomsma (University of Sydney)

Room T004

Abstract:

This paper seeks to analyse (a) how human actors together with vibrant things shape the production of evidence of impact using performance measurement; and (b) the tactics mobilised to justify and make sense of the use of quasi-evidence (evidence that breaches ‘the’ rules of evidence). The empirics are based on an international development NGO motivated to produce ‘rigorous’ evidence of impact using performance evaluation. The case highlights how, inter alia, variable consultants, fluid survey instruments, language proliferation, and muddy roads result in the production of quasi-evidence. The use of quasi-evidence is justified through open acknowledgement of evidential absence, the influence of ‘uncontrollable’ factors, organisational immaturity, and a discourse of hopeful betterment. Such justification, however, is grounded in irony and contradiction. The greater demand for evidence resulted in the rejection of randomised control trials as infeasible science and is now associated with a looser, ‘more feasible’ definition of impact. But the continued reliance on ‘scientific’ methods for the assembling of evidence results in the persistent acceptance and use of quasi-evidence.