The politics in the BSC: issues of performance measurement and strategic
alignment
In contrast to the view of the determination of strategic priorities, performance targets and indicators as a politically neutral exercise permeating Kaplan and Norton’s work,a growing number of studies have started to draw attention to how the design of
performance measurement systems for the purpose of strategic alignment is infused
with political processes. For instance, Brignall and Modell (2000) argued that the weight attached to specific performance aspects is a function of the relative power of diverse stakeholder groups and that the balance between various performance indicators is contingent on the propensity of senior management to ally itself with particular interests rather than a natural outcome of successful implementation of BSCs. Empirical studies exploring the use of BSCs in the public sector corroborate this observation whilst illustrating how relatively “imbalanced” approaches to performance management are
reinforced by tendencies to mainly define as strategically relevant what is easily
measurable (Carmona and Gro¨nlund, 2003; Chang, 2006; Lawrence and Sharma, 2002).
Similar tendencies have recently been reported from private sector companies where the
influence of capital markets has been found to remain paramount and foster a one-sided
emphasis on financial control despite the existence of corporate-level BSCs (Kraus and
Lind, 2010). It is of course, possible that such outcomes are reinforced by poorly designed BSCs or failures to link managerial incentives to a reasonably balanced set of
performance indicators (Kaplan and Norton, 2001). However, the studies reviewed above
go beyond such explanations to examine how organizational dependence on various
stakeholders fosters particular managerial mindsets detracting from balanced pursuits
of performance. They thus begin to steer away from a view of managers as value-neutral
optimizers and provide some clues as to how we may probe into the politics embedded
in the very design of BSCs as vehicles of strategic alignment.