The conference

Citation

Radnor, Z. and Kennerley, M. (2005), "The conference", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 54 No. 5/6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2005.07954eaa.001

The conference

Dr Zoe Radnor is a Lecturer in Operations Management at Warwick Business School. Her career has included academic appointments at Bradford University School of Management, Manchester Business School and Leeds University Business School. Her PhD is from UMIST and considers the effect of Lean Working and Corporate Anorexia in manufacturing organisations. Generally her research areas are based around operations strategy and organisational behaviour/studies looking at the effect and impact of change initiatives on the organisation. Recently, she has been involved with and managing research projects that have evaluated the use of Performance Management Systems in the Public Sector, developing an understanding of Innovation/New Product Development tools and considering the impact of management initiatives on the individual. E-mail: zoe.radno@wbs.ac.uk

Dr Mike Kennerley is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield School of Management. He has been working in the field of performance measurement and management for over ten years undertaking academically rigorous and practically relevant research. Prior to joining Cranfield Mike held positions at the University of Cambridge and UMIST. Mike's research interests focus on business performance measurement, including the design, implementation and use performance measurement and management systems. This includes measurement and management of performance in the Public Sector, in relation to Corporate Social Responsibility, stakeholder approaches as well as decision making in managing performance. Mike co-chaired the 4th International Conference of Performance Measurement and Management (PMA 2004). E-mail: m.kennerley@cranfield.ac.uk

The conference

Performance Measurement and Management: Public and Private, the 4th International Conference of the Performance Measurement Association (PMA) took place from 28th to 30th July 2004 at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The conference, which was chaired by Professor Andy Neely and Dr Mike Kennerley, was a great success attracting over 300 delegates from 40 countries hearing presentations on issues as wide ranging as Public Sector performance, intangible assets and intellectual capital, as well as the design, implementation and use of measurement systems.

The conference provided a unique, inter-disciplinary and international forum to exchange knowledge, experiences and insights on performance measurement and management. The conference provided one of the few opportunities for academics and practitioners to discuss together the latest developments in research and practice in the field. One third of the 160 presentations were made by practitioners. As the title suggests the conference sought to share and exchange knowledge and insights gained in the Public and Private Sectors identifying similarities and differences. Keynotes speeches were delivered by Professor Sir Andrew Likierman from London Business School, Professor Chris Ittner from Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and David Loweth from the UK Accounting Standards Board.

Following on from previous conferences, the 2004 conference made a further significant contribution to the aims of the PMA, which are:

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  To encourage the development of a multi-disciplinary community around performance measurement and management.

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  To provide networking opportunities for members of that community so that individuals can better understand the research that has been undertaken into the field of performance measurement and management on a world wide basis.

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  To facilitate the exchange of information and ideas about theory and practice in the emerging field of performance measurement and management.

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  To encourage the exchange and joint development of teaching and education materials designed for practitioners in the field of performance measurement and management.

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  To enable the rapid transfer of ideas, concepts and insights in the field of performance measurement and management from academia to business and vice versa.

In a further contribution to these aims, we are delighted to be able to present this special journal issue of selected papers from the conference.

The special issue

From the conference a short list of 35 papers were drawn up and the authors invited to submit a complete article for review. In response to this 23 papers were submitted and reviewed with 12 papers deemed suitable for publication in this special (double) issue. We would like to thank all the authors and reviewers for the excellent response and responding so promptly to the deadlines set. We hope that they and you agree that the breadth and quality of papers included in this issue represent clearly the quality of the research being carried in the discipline as well as the diverse nature of Performance Measurement and Management Academic Writing.

The first paper is by Steven Melnyk and his colleagues from Michigan State University and the University of New Mexico. It was awarded the Best Academic Paper Award at the conference. Through in-depth case studies the paper shows how performance measures can be deployed and aligned at different organisational levels. The paper demonstrates the importance of alignment of measures to effective management and identifies the factors that affect this deployment and alignment.

The next two papers by Laitinen and Rocha-Fernanades, Mills and Fleury relate to Balanced Scorecard implementation illustrated by case studies and empirical analysis. The following paper by Magnan, St-Onge and Cormier evaluates Profit-Sharing Plans (PSPs) in Strategic Business Units suggesting that PSPs have a limited life cycle in raising earnings performance. The paper by Tapinos, Dyson and Meadows investigates the impact of performance measurement in the strategic planning process, through the use of a large-scale survey. The findings of this survey reported in the paper indicate that performance measurement stands as one of the four main factors characterising the current practice of strategic planning. The next couple of papers by Sousa et al. and Van Aken et al. take an engineering and systems perspective to performance measurement and management which present an approach for conceptual design of an enterprise performance measurement and management system and an illustration of an application of a tool for assessing the effectiveness of performance measurement systems.

Gosselin's paper presents the results of a survey of manufacturing firms which asked about the use of particular performance measures, determinants in choosing these measures and characteristics of management control systems. The results show that within manufacturing forms of financial performance measures still dominate despite the rise in the recommendations to implement a more balanced approach. At the other end of organisation the paper by Bednall evaluates the performance of marketing/market research functions relating the findings to the strategic positioning the function takes in the organisation in order for decision making and market information dissemination.

The final three papers consider the Public rather than the Private Sector. The first of these by Pilcher takes an Australian perspective of Local Government particularly the financial comparative performance measures and through an extensive study of 170 councils in New South Wales the paper offers some reparation for the lack of empirical research on local government FKPIs. Moving from local government to schools the paper by Brown provides an overview and evaluation of the various ways which performance management is being implemented in England's primary schools concluding that under certain circumstances performance management can improve the quality of primary education. The final paper of this set and the issue by Pidd considers the perverse or dysfunctional consequences of performance measurement. The paper draws together literature from both Public and Private Sector and a range of disciplines in order to understand why the preserve effects occur. An area which is under researched but much needed, i.e. the behavioural rather than process or structure aspect of performance measurement and management.

We hope you enjoy this issue and we look forward to bringing you another special issue from the 2006 PMA conference which will be even bigger and brighter than the last!

Zoe Radnor and Mike KennerleyGuest Editors