government – although there are a few ‘‘strong
pockets of support’’ around it (Bradley, 2001).20
Promoting and consolidating the Office’s claims
to expertise
Building a claim to expertise is a continuous
process. As Office auditors were developing expertise
in measuring government performance, they
made claims to promote their emergent expertise
in documents and verbal statements on how performance
measurement should be implemented in
Alberta. As argued by Abbott (1988), claims of
expertise are indissociable from prescriptions on
how specific tasks (here, to measure the performance
of government) should be conducted. This
section examines the elements of the emerging
and increasingly stabilized network in Alberta by
which the claims of audit expertise about performance
measurement were consolidated.21
Further, the consolidation of the auditors’
expertise was facilitated by undermining the legitimacy
of the expertise of alternative providers of
performance measures. In our case, this was partly
achieved by drawing on general discourses about
the untrustworthiness of government managers.
This is a fundamental point. Undermining the
claims of program managers and other professionals
employed in government (teachers, doctors,
nurses, engineers, historians and so on) regarding
the assessment of performance is important in providing
space for auditors to claim expertise in performance
measurement. As we elaborate below, it
is not that managers and other professionals are
unable to measure performance, but rather that
their measures need to be checked by a person seen
to be objective and to have an expertise in assessing
measures, the auditor. Politicians and the
media, influenced by an implicit understanding of
agency theory with its view that managers use
information strategically and are not constrained
by professional ideals, complained about the selfinterest
of public servants and distrusted their
judgments. Auditors could draw on general scepticism
about the objectivity of managers’ own measures
of performance and offer to provide a more
‘‘independent’’ point of view on proposed performance
measures, to the extent that government
managers often failed to recognize that their prior
practices could be interpreted as providing judgments
of performance. By the end of the period
most managers presented their judgments as legitimate
only when sanctified by the procedures associated
with the Auditor General.
Removing a troublesome role definition
One of the first prescriptional moves made by
the Office to promote its expertise and views
about performance measurement involved arguing
against the direct assessment model, which
had been initially suggested by government as
the role for the Office in the 1993 Budget Speech.
Under the direct assessment model, auditors measure
and report on the performance of the organizations
that they have audited (CCAF, 1996).
Office members were not comfortable with this
model, perceiving it as too distant from their traditional
role of providing credibility to financial
statements prepared by management. Office auditors
preferred an approach that other state auditors
increasingly were advocating, namely, the
indirect assessment model – in which auditors
provide credibility to measures developed by
management:
We [Office members] all buy into the idea of
it [i.e., the indirect assessment model]
because there is some wonderful logic to it
and it is that management should be responsible
for measuring its own effectiveness, if
you like, and they should be making assertions.
So we took the view that management
is in the best position to measure and report
on their effectiveness. And the auditor would
20 Our most recent observations suggest that program evaluation
is being re-evaluated by the Office and many program
managers. It is increasingly seen as offering a potential to
explain program performance, not simply to measure it. This
does not undermine the claims of auditors as indeed it can be
seen as a self-confident move to further expand the expertise
available to the Office.
21 Although we discuss each element in turn, there is no
sequential ordering implicit in our presentation – many
elements overlapped and occurred simultaneously