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.