Today, a new paper appears in the European Accounting Review, written by Bernadette Bullinger, Leon Stam and myself. In the paper, we examine how a family firm professionalized after a private equity fund took over 51% of the shares. Our case illustrates the performative nature of accounting devices like budgets, and highlights how key employees can help render them taken for granted. In this blog, we highlight the key findings from our work.
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Op uitnodiging van de Universiteit voor Humanistiek heb ik een keynote verzorgd tijdens de opening van het academisch jaar in de Leeuwenbergh in Utrecht. Het thema van de opening was “Vrij Denken.” De volledige tekst van de keynote staat in deze blog, inclusief een aantal referenties (onderaan de pagina).
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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.
Berend van der Kolk 