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