Performance Management and the Ethics of Office in Public Service

The implementation of New Public Management (NPM) instruments into public agencies was a key aspect of the welfare state reforms in Europe in the late 90s and early 2000s. Amongst them, management by objectives (MBO) has become a widespread strategy for the governance of employment agencies. In Germany, the so-called “Hartz reforms” (2003-05) aimed at more effective, efficient, and less bureaucratic employment services. To accomplish this goal, the German Federal Employment Agency and its subsidiary bodies have systematically integrated MBO and accounting into leadership and labour processes. Since then, every local employment agency has to achieve specified key figures. Recently, however, the German Federal Audit Office questioned this managerial model. The auditors alluded to MBO’s potential to undermine social rights by rewarding target gaming or “creaming” strategies. This, in turn, would favour the provision of employment services to people that are easy to place with a job while disregarding the more disadvantaged. By this impulse from the organizational environment the discursive field about MBO and accounting has become an arena for debates about the prioritizing of different values in administrative behaviour and in organizational life. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted with employees in German Employment Agencies, this paper scans the different ways of submission, adaption, and resistance to management practices. Ethical issues in the provision of employment services could arise in consequence of orders to increase key figures. Thus, the paper asks what “office holding” means under the conditions of performance management, what kind of ethical foundations are virulent in decision making in frontline delivery of social policies, and what ethical and social potential could lie in a revitalization of an “ethics of office”.