Academia is in a credibility crisis. A record-breaking 10,000 scientific papers were retracted in 2023 because of scientific misconduct, and academic journals are overwhelmed by AI-generated images, data, and texts. To understand the roots of this problem, we must look at the role of metrics in evaluating the academic performance of individuals and institutions.
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How to stimulate interpersonal trust in organizations? How can performance management contribute to trust? And, can other types of management control also enhance interpersonal trust? These questions are addressed in our recent study amongst healthcare managers, as published in The British Accounting Review (open access). In this blog (also published on Social Science Space and the European Accounting Association’s blog), we highlight our three key findings.
Continue readingStand van Nederland (NPO2) besteedt op 17 februari 2024 aandacht aan “De Meetmaatschappij”. In de aflevering wordt o.a. gesproken met een slaapspecialist over de zin en onzin van apps om de kwaliteit van je slaap te meten, de beslissing van de Universiteit van Utrecht om zich terug te trekken uit een internationale ranglijst, en reflecteer ik op de vraag waarom we toch zoveel in cijfers willen uitdrukken en wat dat met ons en onze maatschappij doet.
Zie hier de pagina van Omroep WNL over de uitzending.
What drives the use of performance measurement (PM) systems in the public sector? And what are the effects of PM use? In a recent study in Financial Accountability & Management (Van der Kolk, 2022, open access), I address these questions. In this blog, I highlight seven observations from the review.
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Recently, my paper “Performance measurement in the public sector: Mapping 20 years of survey research” was published in Financial Accountability and Management, a scientific journal dedicated to study management practices in governments, charities and public services.
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The omnipresence of smiley evaluations, rankings, scores, key performance indicators and school grades hardly surprise us anymore. We take their presence and value for granted. But these quantified measures of performance come at a cost, I argue in a recent commentary in Business & Society.
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I am honored (and still a bit overwhelmed) by the decision of Thinkers50 to include me in the Thinkers50 RADAR 2020. Continue reading
The journal Public Money & Management (PMM) has both an academic and a practitioner readership, and called for contributions to a special issue about developing civil servants. A brief note on motivating civil servants that I submitted was published online this week.
This week, our study of the use of performance measurement in hospitals was published in Health Care Management Review – and the best part: it’s open access!
In an effort to not become an “ivory tower academic“, I accepted the invitation from Follow The Money (a Dutch platform for investigative journalism) to start writing some brief articles. In these articles, I focus on issues related to management, accounting, behavior and ethics, and try to communicate research findings from the fields of management, accounting and business ethics to a wider audience.
Berend van der Kolk 