The Balanced Scorecard and the Supermodernity of Performance Management
- what it is that works for the concept, and how it challenges management?
By:
Niels Dechow
European Business School
Gustav-Stresemann-Ring 3
D-65189 Wiesbaden, Germany
niels.dechow@ebs.edu
Tel: +49 611 7102 1222
Fax: +49 611 710210 1222
The Balanced Scorecard and the Supermodernity of Performance Management
- what it is that works for the concept, and how it challenges management?
Abstract
This paper introduces intertextual analysis as a means for understanding management
concepts beyond the explanation of fads and fashions. It explores the Balanced Scorecard in
terms of the ways central manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton (1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006,
2008) present ideas, organize resources and inscribes the concept into management. On this
basis it analyses what it is that works for the Balanced Scorecard? In sum of its findings, the
paper argues that the Balanced Scorecard conceptually is best understood as a non-practice
that places performance management, where it is not. The Balanced Scorecard represents no
practice. Nevertheless, it has made fact out of such aethestics that stimulates demand by the
absence of any resemblance. Performance management the Balanced Scorecard way does not
extend corporate performance measurement practices. It challenges them by a particular form
of networking ‘desirable realities’ / wishful thinking, which the paper discusses as illustrative
of a supermodernist turn in management theory.
2
1.
Introduction
A question, which has been granted little attention by current literature is, at which level to
engage with modern management concepts? It seems as if concepts are either explained on a
very high level as management fads and fashions or on the micro-level of actor-networks in
local practice. Their working assumption is that researchers, in order to know objects, must
first study relationships in action. As Boedker (2010 – P.602) discusses “the performative
approach encourages scholars not to fall into the trap of subjecting social analysis to a metalanguage and imposing building blocks and definitions…which may speak more on behalf of
actors than letting actors speak themselves”.
At the level of fads and fashions (Abrahamson, 1991,1996, Kieser, 1997, Armstrong, 2002),
focus has been given, for example, to the ambiguity of management ideas that diffuse widely
(Newell, Robertson & Swan, 2001); the loose couplings between a concept label and the
dynamics involved in the ongoing shaping and reshaping of its meaning (Benders & van Veen,
2001). Following such mode of thinking, a recurring insight produced in relation to the
Balanced Scorecard concept by Kaplan & Norton (1992) has been that its significance is to be
found in their adoption and/or adaptation in practice. Some authors find that Balanced
Scorecards in practice differ both in terms of the ways the performance measurements are
sold (Ax & Bjoernestad, 2005; Malmi, 2001; Modell, 2009), and how they become enacted in
organisations and across cultures (Malmi, 2001; Speckbacher, Bischof and Pfeiffer, 2003;
Wiersma, 2009).
With few exceptions little is known about the Balanced Scorecard on a level in the microlevel studies exploring it by a performative lens and macro-level studies explaining it in terms
of fads and fashions. Some have suggested that the Balanced Scorecard lacks a valid
theoretical logical underpinning (eg. Noerreklit, 2000, 2003; Bessire & Richard Baker, 2005).
In the view of Noerreklit, the Balanced Scorecard fails to convince for a variety of reasons. In
her view, it suffers from the limitation of logical fallacies (Noerreklit, 2000) and also she
points out that its claims do not build on a reliable theoretical base that offers validity
(Noerreklit, 2003). Following these early critiques, others have – often together with
Noerreklit – argued that the Balanced Scorecard seeks to persuade via recurring appeals to
source authority (Noerreklit & Mitchell, 2007; that the BSC is first and foremost ideological
and that its managerial ideology is culture-bound (Bourguignon, Malleret, Noerreklit, 2004)
and so on. A common feature of these and many other studies is that they have often been
driven by a search for virtues, leaving aside the aesthetics1, on which the Balanced Scorecard
like many other concepts are based. As for example coined by Ittner & Larcker (1998 – P.234)
“…it would be useful to know whether the balanced scorecard represents solutions to real
problems facing firms or are simply fads that consultants have developed”.
Curiously, we have not yet explored this question and/or the related question: what it is that
works for the Balanced Scorecard (given all the things we now know, do not work for it)?
Surveys have documented that as many 50% of the managers remain dissatisfied with their
BSC implementation (Ittner, Larcker & Meyer, 2003). Regardless, the Balanced Scorecard is
still after 20 years presented in most accounting text books as a tool for strategic management
accounting (Langfield-Smith, 2007). Instead, some have pondered that perhaps one should not
at all focus so much on the concept, but more on its implementation (eg. Ittner, Larcker &
Meyer, 2003), or that possibly interaction with objects has to be invented in order to become
important to organisational management conduct and that managers first have to learn to
1
For a distinction and discussion of the turn from virtues to aesthetics in modern society see Knorr-Cetina, 2006.
3
construct and negotiate the idea of performance measurement links, in order for them to mean
anything (eg Banker, Chang & Pizzini, 2004). In parallel, others have suggested that it must
be the flexible nature of the Balanced Scorecard that that promotes its acceptance (see for
example Aidemark, 2001; Modell, 2004; Johanson, Skoog, Backlund & Almquist, 2006). If
not explicitly, then at least implicitly such considerations do little but to call for micro-level
studies of Balanced Scorecard practices. But, what then do we do with the concept?
There are those, who have theorized the Balanced Scorecard as a ‘boundary object’ whose
configuration depends first and foremost on the situation in which a company finds itself (eg
Hansen & Mouritsen, 2005). More recently, others have researched it in terms of such
inscriptions that develop, rise and fail in between management consultants and practitioners.
Using this lens, Qu & Cooper (2011 – P.2) argue that “the BSC presents a practical challenge
for consultants and managers to populate a generic framework with elements (such as
measures and goals) relevant and specific to a client’s situation”. This position parallels that
of Hansen & Mouritsen (2005 – P.148), who suggest to see this concept as just “an imagery
that provides a form into which management practices can be put and which combine what
may be a shorthand for any conceivable concern that management for a firm may have”.
In their study, Hansen & Mouritsen (2005 – P.129) acknowledge the Balanced Scorecard
robustness of some sort – “which we consider to be the distinction between non-financial and
financial numbers - leading and lagging indicators – organized and balanced in several
perspectives and with a relation to strategy implementation“. However, beyond this
recognition, the texture of this robustness is not addressed. On a general level, Hansen &
Mouritsen (2005 – P.125) acknowledge that “management accounting is no longer neutral as
Anthony (1965) suggested”, and further relay that “project managers were conscious of
possible differences between what they would term the ‘theory of the BSC’ and the way they
wished to draw it into their firms”. However, explicitly their study was not designed to
explore what is that the Balanced Scorecard mediates about performance management. In line
with their agenda to research the Balanced Scorecard as a “boundary object”, merely they
note that the Balanced Scorecard can “…be bent towards purposes so that a local identity [can]
be upheld and yet, at the same time, as the notion that BSC [is] implemented, and not
something else, [can] also be upheld” (Hansen & Mouritsen (2005 – P.144). Qu & Cooper
(2011 – P.5) parallel this approach by noting that the Balanced Scorecard represents
something that extends from a far into the local setting of their case study.
A further feature common to both studies is that they both report that actors saw the Balanced
Scorecard as something substantial. In the study by Hansen & Mouritsen (2005, P.125), we
are informed that a practitioner pointed to significant differences between the local
implementation in comparison to what he considered ‘Balanced Scorecard theory’. Vice versa,
in the study by Qu and Cooper (2011), a main actor is reported to note “that the current use of
the BSC was limited and that the group was in the very early stages of adopting performance
measures”. In other words, practitioners note that there is something more to the concept
than what one can necessarily study in local practice. Could they be right, and if so how do
we bring it about, without falling into the trap of imposing arbitrary building blocks and
definitions to our understanding of the social?
The purpose of this article is to introduce and explore how intertextual analysis can help
accounting studies engage with such modern management concepts that survive because of
their aesthetics, not least. Intertextual analysis concerns itself with two things in particular.
One concerns the ways in which one (or more) sign system are incorporated into another sign
system. The other concerns the semiotic changes that this transposition entails (Allen, 2011).
4
As Moi (1986) discusses, this transposition has often been understood in its banal sense as a
“study of sources” (for the purposes of tracing these). Yet, the study of transpositions is not
concerned with the sources, as such, as they matter only to the extent that they can help us
illustrate how texts - by reference to “sources” obscure for the reader, how a text “remediates” (Bolter & Gromola (2003, Pp.90-91) its topic. As also Rifaterre (1984, P.159)
discusses, “the more faithfully a text is supposed to reflect the manifold aspects of reality, or
the more it proclaims itself a mirror, the more total [is]the subordination of the mimetic
multiplicity to a single message, to a semiotic oneness”. So what? Do we really need this?
Recently, there are those who have cautioned that “managers who believe that things are
simple intermediaries that can be settled once and for all may do better to understand that
they are mediators that translate and in translation often distort, which is why they not only
help, but also lure and betray” Czarniawska & Mouritsen (2009 – P.172). The Balanced
Scorecard could be a very good example of such a thing, which we – perhaps more so than
managers – have nominalised to the extent that we still do not know what it is that works for
the Balanced Scorecard, and how that transposes on us. Statements and observations offered
in the aforementioned case studies suggest that practitioners are somehow aware that text and
organisation somehow could be intertwined (McPhee, 2004). Why then would we want to
think of the Balanced Scorecard as a ‘simplistic visualization’- a graphic with four boxes,
different categories and several arrows, which is flexible in nature and does not offer anything
new or logically valid? As Quattrone (2009 – P.88) has already pointed out in a very different
context studies of “the fabrication of the book and the way in which signs are organized or
‘imagined’ is a step towards understanding the fabrication of knowledge and the organisation
of society”.
From the perspective of this paper, it seems worthwhile reflecting on the point that the
explicit acknowledgement of the Balanced Scorecard primarily as a ‘boundary object’ (Star &
Griesemer, 1989) with “interpretative viability” (Benders & van Veen, 2001) disengages a
part of the discourse within which practioners work and vice versa to which they contribute
through their work and our studies of their work. Arguably at least, it is not clear why such
‘bracketing of the world’ would not reduce in unforeseen ways concepts to things that as
intermediaries merely carries and transports forward rather than to constitute, create, modify,
resist and/or break-down as mediators (see also Latour, 1993; 2005). Texts function as
repositories that produce ‘objects’ to be managed. Nevertheless, despite our “growing interest
in discourse and its consequences for organizational life, very few studies focus explicitly on
the agency of organizational texts” (Coreen, 2004 – P.374). Texts perform something.
Nevertheless, it seems as if so far “the textual dimensions of organization are buried in ...
standard nominalization” (Smith, 2001– P.171).
In line with this line of reasoning, this paper introduces to management accounting
intertextual analysis as a spectacle for exploring how Kaplan & Norton (1992, 1996, 2001,
2004, 2006, 2008) have textured the ways that the Balanced Scorecard transposes
performance management. It may be that this peculiar, composite institution does not offer
theory in a conventional sense of a virtue-based, past-oriented moral model (Knorr-Cetina,
2006 – P.236). Nevertheless, also the promise-based, future-oriented, cognitive-emotional and
aesthetically features that textualise performance management may also be able to tell us
important things about this concept and how it re-accentuates performance management.
The point here is not to criticize past works, but rather to point out that they motivate a search
for a different type of spectacle and analysis and that we in light of them should challenge
ourselves to review, at what levels have we so far engaged with managerial concepts, such as
5
the Balanced Scorecard? Various studies have documented that BSCs often fail (e,g, Ahn,
2001; Laitinen, 2003) and in parallel others have suggested that Balanced Scorecards have
only moderate to little impact on organisational practice (Banker, Chang & Pizzini, 2004;
Kraus & Lind, 2010; Malmi, 2001; Smith, 2002). Nevertheless, we do not seem to understand,
yet what it is that works for the Balanced Scorecard, if and how these features challenge
management? By itself this question is interesting, at least from the perspective that it can
direct us to a level in between the macro- and micro- levels by which the Balanced Scorecard
has been studied, so far. Moreover this question is interesting, because we meanwhile begin to
see research that takes over notions from the Balanced Scorecard for the broader purpose of
motivating studies of management control (systems). One such example is Mundy (2009 –
P.17), who argues that “balance presents a complex challenge for organisations…” At first
glance, the argument sounds intuitive and straight-forward. Beyond its ostensive meaning,
however, the question is, whether it is clear at all2. Another example is the recent study by
Taylor (2011), which by an experimental approach finds a method, which (re-)constructs in
managers such cause-effect focus on performance measurements that Kaplan & Norton (1996)
search for.
In a situation where the logics of a concept begin to inform how subsequent research is
written up and/or how experiments are developed, it seems relevant to engage more closely
with the underlying management concept. For these purposes, this paper introduces to the
spectacle of “intertextual analysis” and applies it to the main manuscripts by Kaplan &
Norton (1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008) in order to study: both what it is that works for
the Balanced Scorecard, and if/how that challenges management in any particular ways? In
so doing, it this study does not imply that management concepts offer meta-languages that
impose building blocks on ‘real’ practices (Boedker, 2010). Merely, it suggests that texts on
management concept constitute an important source of imaginations that may influence, how
readers contemplate performance management - or think its practice. In the words of Putnam
& Correen, 2004 (P.xx), “recognizing that texts contribute, in part, to the enactment of
organizations guards against a tendency to reify ‘structures’ that precede and constrain
member interactions”.
2.
Theoretical Coordinates
2.1. Introducing Intertextual Analysis
As mentioned, intertextual analysis concerns itself with A/ the ways in which one (or more)
sign system are incorporated into another sign system and B/ the semiotic changes that this
transposition entails (Allen, 2011 – P.228).
Intertextual analysis involves a study of three types of functions by which texts respectively
promote, organize and relays ideas (Kress, 2001). Ideational functions concern the style by
which a text promotes ideas and/or ways of working. In comparison, textual functions concern
themselves with the means or bodies by which a text organizes interaction. Finally,
interpersonal functions are concerned with representations by which the text inscribes
management and in doing so justifies itself as (part of) a wider discourse. The study of these
functions allows us to understand the texture of artefacts, or how a design works. As Moi
(1986, P.111) cautions, intertextuality “has often been understood in the banal sense of study
2
At least it does seem to depend on an underlying assumption of particular virtues as for example those searched
for by Noerreklit (2000) in her article titled “The Balance on the Balanced Scorecard”?
6
of sources”. However, first and foremost “intertextuality” as a term denotes a transposition of
one (or several) sign-system(s) into another, which specifies “that the passage from one
signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic – of enunciative and
denotative positionality”.
Stated differently, in studying how texts draw together and remediate a number of (decentred)
resources, intertextual analysis helps us to trace respectively how positions (or objects) and
agencies are created, and how they are related to represent an artefact. The latter can be
described as something that isn’t – yet that takes appearance given the ways that the texts we
read transpose a topic through its particular ways of drawing on, modifying and re-focusing
its discourse. So to speak, intertextual analysis helps us show how artefacts influence ways of
re-calling, reasoning and applying ideas to objects, agencies and their relationships in such
ways that a topic - like performance management, for example – is rendered with topology.
From an intertextual point of view, artefacts are never neutral. They leave marks that remain,
or develop what Derrida (1988) also refers to as “restance”. The terminology introduced here
is summarized in the table, below.
Discourse
Ideational
Functions
Textual
Functions
Interpersonal
Functions
Representation
...draw on
How to Know
...modify
How to Think
...re-focus
How to Apply
Idea
Position
Organize
Relate
Artefact
Table 1: Introduction to Intertextual Analysis
Intertextual analysis contrasts other linguistic approaches that (inspired by Saussure, 1959)
have developed a meticulous analysis of languages, including the choice of phrases, the ways
that fragments are combined into larger units etc (Kress, 2001 – P.35). It understands the
starting point for analysis to be the text in its entirety. This focus entails the attempt to study
relations in between elements rather than the elements per se, which are mainly recorded as a
rhetoric. Thus, the question of interest to an intertextual analysis is how a text positions
ideational, textual and interpersonal functions to draw on, modify and/or re/accentuate
resources that constitute performance management, for example. Ex ante, intertextual analysis
does not specify these resources, but understands these as entailing a broad sum of practices,
roles and institutions (Miettinen & Virkkunen, 2005).
There are those who suggest that “laying bare the choices revealed in the structures is to lay
bare the structures of the environments in which the choice was made (Kress, 2001 – P34).
Acknowledging this point, others focus more on the type of agency that texts extend for
authors simultaneously positioning these functions in relation to each other in the aim of
specific goals. As Munir & Phillips (2005 – P.1668) discuss: …being able to inhabit a
subject position allows the agent to have particular effects on how objects are constituted.
Second, many of the texts that make up the discourse are produced from certain socially
constructed positions that can only be inhabited by certain kinds of agents.” The influence
that Robert Kaplan and more widely the Harvard Business School has exercised on the
development of management accounting has been discussed elsewhere (eg Zeff, 2008). In
comparison, however intertextual analysis aims at drawing attention to the dependence of
7
texts on society and history for resources and vice versa also how texts given certain socially
constructed (authorship) positions then contribute to transform social and historical resources
(Fairclough, 1999 – P.185). In other words, intertextual analysis is based on the assumption
(Halliday, 1978, 1985) that we through its ways of studying text can learn about authors
choice between presence and absence and in turn, how these choice re-mediate what we learn
about a topic – performance management, for example.
2.2. A Note on the Dataset
Arguably, the number of Balanced Scorecard constituents today is broad and multi-faceted.
This study takes its point of departure in the manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton (1992, 1996,
2001, 2004, 2006). These manuscripts qualify as being original and elaborate documents on
the concept, and therefore they should allow ample opportunity to study the ideational, textual
and interpersonal functions, discussed before. Clearly, the Balanced Scorecard as it is known
and developed today entails more constituents than the book manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton.
Examples one could point to include the so-called Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame, the
Balanced Scorecard reports published by Harvard Business School, but also general textbook
on management control, strategic management accounting etc. Nevertheless, the choice to
mainly restrict the source materials to the books by Kaplan & Norton is motivated by the
argument that each of the books (1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008) each mark an addition and/or
modification of the original concept idea (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) that is particular because
of its contribution to the topology of the Balanced Scorecard concept.
Discursive
Resources
that text:
Ideational
Functions
…re-accentuates
performance
management by
introducing:
Interpersonal
Functions
Multiplicity of prior
concepts re-presented
as tools promoting radical
change management
Amendment to GoalSeeking Process based
on Organisation‘s
Short-Term Priorities
Individual Leadership
is emphasized through
frequent references to
actor/organizations
performance management
as plastic in between
strategy and structure
Specific investments in
form - step by step
accounts – shift away
attention from practice
Practice references
produce source authority
that in turn jusitfies the
use of project methods
Narrative approach to
Business Modeling via
hypothetical lead-lag
indicators (cause/effect)
Organizational constructs
reposition performance
management beyond
day-to-day practice in a
project environment
Templates projecting
„otherness“ are used
to motivate radical
change - rather than
gradual improvments
Graphics that lay out the
performance management
process as certain and
linear rather than fluid and
driven by uncertainty
Managerial role informed
via metaphors that
emphasize both teamwork and event work
with clear beginning /end
Practice questions
virtually absent, or
positioned as inferior
to project management
…draws on
management ideas
in order to:
Contextualization of
…modifies control
system logic by
means of:
Textual
Functions
Table 2: A Topology of the Balanced Scorecard
The table above lists nine elements found in the Kaplan & Norton manuscripts and discussed
below. By no means does this study claim that the sum of particularities discussed provides a
final BSC-account. Recalling a cautioning by Fairclough (1999), it is important to keep in
mind that intertextual analysis – by virtue of its focus on text – is bound to entail a re-analysis
of other author’s data. The outcome of the analysis should therefore be read as a performance
management profile that results from the ways that the Balanced Scorecard informs
performance management as a discourse. This profile does not equal “superimposing building
blocks” (Boedker, 2010) that will explain practice-based studies, but they can help those using
case study methodologies to explore, how practitioners adopt, modify, improve upon – or for
8
that matter, betray – the concept. In other words, the profiles developed by intertextual
analysis allows us to raise questions that can help academia produce accounts on the (missing)
effects of one or the other concept. The profile, however, does not substitute for such answers
all by itself.
3.
Intertextual Analysis of the Balanced Scorecard
Intertextual analysis suggests that the BSC places performance management below such
virtues presumed in previous research. The question: what it is that works for the BSC, must
therefore be addressed by an introductory caution. It is not, what one might and reasonably
could have expected. This, the following analysis will illustrate, by by looking at the ways
that the BSC positions performance management (as an object); organizes BSC work (and
thereby an idea about agencies): and last but not least, relates the positions presented on
performance management with the work it takes to introduce – or implement – this concept in
practice. A brief summary of the observations made on these three aspects is introduced
below, before the analysis of specific examples in the following subsections.
The Balanced Scorecard repositions performance management by associating performance
management with change management rather than with the activity of measuring
performances. Vis-à-vis strategy and structure – respectively introduced as given and solid,
performance management is subordinated as a third and plastic component. It gains meaning
through narrative accounts, or hypothetical cause-effect relationships, but must be thought of
as a linear process. In the manuscripts words and visuals inform that performance
management should be thought of as a project with clear beginnings and ends. Uncertainties
with regards to the organizational flow of change remains unaccounted for.
In the texts, BSC work is organized around such investments in form that on the one hand
forge a stable relationship between authors and reader, but which on the other hand also lock
in the latter to (only) contemplate the BSC as a reproduction of reconfigurable forms. These
two effects result from numerous step-by-step accounts. Although motivated by the
possibility of producing “quick wins” within longer-term goal seeking processes, the BSC deemphasizes how performance management is constructive of managerial agency. Instead, the
BSC texts offer step-by-step accounts that prescribe managers in the service of the object. In
other words, performance management is introduced as a contemplation – a processing by
means of predefined ideas, rather than a reflection on the work it takes to bind together a set
of decentred resources and constituents.
Finally, the BSC texts render opaque how relations are forged between performance
management and managerial agencies. Object-Agency relations are substituted with an
emphasis on the use of (consulting) templates and the necessity of (individual) leadership.
Templates stand in for otherness. They simulate that alternatives exist and/or could easily be
crafted. In parallel leadership emphasis allows the text to defocus from the missing
explanations of what Balanced Scorecard work entails – in particular, once the linear
implementation project is finalized. An emphasis on the BSC as project work de-emphasizes
the significance of practice-related questions and in effect unchains object and agency aspects.
3.1. Ideational Functions
Four types of arguments position the Balanced Scorecard vis-à-vis a managerial context. They
in sum emphasize that the BSC concept is nothing like performance measurement systems
used on a routine basis. The BSC takes point of departure in discontinuity and a desire for
change management. It is referred to as plastic and adaptable. Moreover, it is introduced in
terms of hypothetical narratives rather than logical numerical relations. Last but not least, it is
9
visualized as having a clear beginning and end. These ideational functions qualify the concept
and in so doing inform an object to be imagined. Framing their information act, Kaplan &
Norton (2001, P.16) offer that: “A successful Balanced Scorecard program starts with the
recognition that this is not a ‘metrics’ project; it’s a change project”.
In order to do so numerous references to other management ideas and concepts are placed
throughout them manuscripts. These help the concept towards a ‘historicity’ of its own
(Latour, 1999). This path of development is crafted via references to, for example: total
quality management; just-in-time production, time-based-management; lean production;
activity-based cost management; employee empowerment (Kaplan & Norton, 1996); beyond
budgeting (Kaplan & Norton, 2008 – P.7). In addition to making these references, the authors
point out, what they (should be taken to) mean. Kaplan & Norton (1996, P.6-7), for example
state that “the goal of these programs is not incremental improvement...[but] discontinuous
performance… But many of [them]… have yielded disappointing results”…[because they] are
being implemented in an environment governed by…financial reports.
The purpose of such a statement is to reposition the Balanced Scorecard vis-à-vis past
concepts. Additional references beyond the field of concepts are also made in order to, for
example, justify “that strategy precedes structure and systems” (Kaplan & Norton, 2006 –
P.39). Statements like these serve to objectify the concept – or to make it a ‘system’. Situating
themselves in their manuscripts, Kaplan & Norton (2006. P.38) suggest that “organizations…
should choose a structure that is reasonable and seems to work without major conflicts, and
then design a customized cascaded system of linked Strategy Maps and Balanced Scorecards
to tune the structure – the corporation and its collection of centralized functions and
decentralized product groups and geographical units – to the strategy”. Literally, this
statement, imagines depth to the object, by qualifying the idea of a system with the image of
something that cascades, yet that in comparison to strategy and structure remains flexible and
plastic. However, the Balanced Scorecard system is untraditional. It transposes the image of
numerical and/or technical systems towards the narrative, the story-telling. Specifically,
Kaplan & Norton (1996) suggest that:



“a properly constructed scorecard should tell the story of the business unit’s
strategy through…a sequence of cause-and-effect relationships”
[P.162] “When the scorecard is viewed as the manifestation of one strategy, the
number of measures on the scorecard becomes irrelevant…”
[P.163] “…most organizations …are incredulous that a Balanced Scorecard of no
more than two dozen measures can be sufficient… They are, of course, correct in a
narrow sense, but they fail to distinguish between diagnostic measures – those…that
monitor… - and strategic measures – those that define…
[P.149]
Whereas diagnostic measures refer to classical performance measurements, the idea of
strategic measures references that the idea that there in any situation is a critical path of action
to be observed3. Kaplan & Norton (1996, P.164) address specifically that “the Balanced
Scorecard is not a replacement for an organization’s day-to-day measurement system”. The
3
At times, the manuscripts blur the distinction between strategic and diagnostic measures. Thus, text passages
are placed in the text that refer specifically to diagnostic measures. For example, Kaplan & Norton (1996, P.307)
write: “certain core outcome measures appear repeatedly on scorecards” – such as “revenue growth/mix”, for
example. At other times, however Kaplan & Norton (2001 – P.77) focus their manuscript on the point that
organisations should define objectives, (strategic) measures, targets and initiatives in order to build cause-effect
hypotheses and, moreover, that they should do so in order to articulate their chains of translation before
summarizing these into specific outcome and performance measurements.
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BSC depends on a process of translation, which involves objectives (strategic) measures,
targets and initiatives (Kaplan & Norton, 2001, P.77).
Throughout a number of graphics are distributed. Examples one may re-collect without
reproduction include the diagram of a cascading process relating leading to lagging
performance measurements in order to visualize the idea of cause and effect (Kaplan &
Norton, 1996); the linear re-organization of the balanced scorecard illustrating how strategy is
clarified by means of strategy mappings (Kaplan & Norton, 2001); the alignment map
(Kaplan & Norton, 2006) providing an overview of organisational checkpoints calling for
centralized coordination and control via a so-called ‘office of strategy management’ etc. In
addition to these ‘icons’, a second type of graphics are used frequently in the manuscripts. In
comparison to the ‘iconic’ images, they introduce a number of textual functions, that visually
organize Balanced Scorecard work and in so doing supplement the ideational functions with
textual functions.
Figure 1: A Transfer of Focus from Object to Agencies
As promoted by Kaplan & Norton (2006, P.260): “The Balanced Scorecard, since its
introduction in 1992, has evolved into the centrepiece of a sophisticated system to manage the
execution of strategy…The net result is the ability to align all units, processes, and systems of
an organization to its strategy… The approach adds several important features to the classic
“plan-do-check-act” closed loop, goal-seeking process introduced by Deming in the quality
movement”. In their view, this amendment revolves around three elements: I/ an emphasis on
strategy as the focal point of management systems, II/ alignment as the main feature of
process and III/ leadership. However, the texts do not discuss how these elements add to the
basic principle of recurring plan-do-check-act cycles. Instead, Kaplan & Norton (2008 – P.32)
acknowledge that: “leadership and strategy formulation remains an art. Although we study
and celebrate examples of good leadership and brilliant strategy, we don’t yet have a
systematic process to create them” (2008 – P.302).
Nevertheless, graphics like the one used above promote that the BSC-object organizes a
change cycle that is certain, rather than uncertain. Moreover, as the following analysis of the
textual functions illustrates, the manuscripts in a variety of ways frame a very particular type
of leadership, which associates more with consulting work than with the management of
practice. On this basis, the following section discusses how the BSC manuscripts subordinate
11
readers to work in the service of object rather than to show, how the object could serve and
connect the agencies of various users.
The ideational functions discussed in this section, suggest that the Balanced Scorecard
positions performance management in a space that de-emphasize the significance of
numerical performance measurements vis-à-vis the production of narratives and storytelling.
Although the concept is likened to a system and also does entail numerical key performance
indicators, the systematic it entails is not one that is designed primarily for reporting purposes.
Instead, the narrative approach to controls emphasizes the articulation of business models and
the possibility of discontinuous change. This positioning of the concept offers many aesthetics,
but at the same time also renders absent – or invisible, at least – virtues traditionally
associated with management reporting and control. As such, this may not render the concept
less credible. But, it remediates both the purpose of performance management within the
discipline of management accounting and the position and focus of management accounting
vis-à-vis other management domains. The following discussion takes point of departure in
this argument, but first the analysis continues to explore use of the textual and interpersonal
functions.
3.2. Textual Functions
With regards to the selection and organization of performance measurements that should
follow the process of translation from objectives over (strategic) measures onwards to targets
and initiatives, Kaplan & Norton (2006 – P.267) emphasize that organisations should
prioritize short term priorities. “Organizations select weights based on the nature of their
business and their short-term priorities… Thus, although measures may stay relatively
consistent from year to year, the relative weights applied to those measures in the annual
compensation plan can vary based on short-term priorities”.
In principle, this short-term focus could be motivated by a concern with incremental
performance improvements. However, as Kaplan & Norton (1996 –P.164) point out, this is
not the virtue they are looking for. “The scorecard measures are chosen to direct the attention
of managers and employees to those factors expected to lead to competitive breakthroughs for
an organization” (Kaplan & Norton, 1996 – P.164). In line with this motivation, the
following analysis shows that Kaplan & Norton employ a variety of textual functions that
organize Balanced Scorecard as projects and use these to prescribe readers agency.
Apart from the very first BSC article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992) all subsequent manuscripts are
organized in relation to step-by-step accounts that frame a project management process.
Thevenot (1984) refers to the use of such devices as an ‘investment in form’ that helps
stabilize a particular point of focus and provide it with its own logic of validity. Curiously,
whereas one might have expected a stabilization of the relation between the object and its
agencies, the manuscripts instead stabilize a relation between author and readers, by which the
former instructs the latter con-template and reproduce the BSC in its reconfigurable forms.
12
1992
1996
The
Balanced
Scorecard
2001
The
Balanced
Scorecard
1.
How do
customers
see us?
1.
2.
What must
we excel at?
2.
Define the
measurement
Architecture
Build Consensus
around Strategic
Measures
The Strategyfocused
Organization
1.
2.
Strategy
Maps
Translate the
1. Define shareholder
Strategy to
/ stakeholder gap
Operational Terms
Align the
Organization to
Strategy
3.
Can we continue
to improve and
create value
3.
Select and Design 3. Make Strategy
Measures
Everyone‘s
Everyday Job
4.
How do we look to
shareholders
4.
Build the
implementation
plan
2006
2004
2.
Reconcile
Customer Value
Proposition
2008
The
Execution
Premium
Alignment
1. Check enterprise
value proposition
2.
Check Corporate
Office / Corp.
Support Units
1.
Develop the
Strategy
2.
Plan the
Strategy
3. Establish the time
line for sustained
results
3. Check Board and
shareholder
Alignment
3.
Align the
Organization
4. Make Strategy a
Continual Process
4. Identify strategic
themes (critical
few processes
4. Check Corporate
Office / Business
Units
4.
Plan
Operations
5. Mobilize Change
through Exec
Leadership
5. Identify and align
intangible assets
5. Check Business
Units / Support
Units
5.
Monitor
& Learn
6. Identify & fund
strategic initiatives
to execute strategy
6. Check Business
Units/Customers
6.
Test
& Adapt
7. Check Business
Support Units /
Suppliers & Ext
Partners
8. Check Corporate
Support
Table 3: Investments in Form by Kaplan & Norton (1992-2008)
As discussed in the following section, the BSC manuscripts relate the object and its agencies
by means of numerous references to templates. To con-template means to think by - or
alongside - a device. The step-by-step accounts listed in the table above are used
imaginatively to segment work with such templates in milestones. In each their way, these
step-by-step task-lists supplement the four questions by which the Balanced Scorecard was
launched in 1992. But, these investments in form also re-accentuate performance management
as a project, which in turn allows the text to prescribe how a project engagement should be
“rolled-out” and implemented into an organisation. Moreover, they render opaque the work it
takes to produce and translate objectives, measures, targets and initiatives into specific
measurements that build a cause-effect relation – as a properly constructed balanced scorecard
should following Kaplan & Norton (1996 – P.149). In other words, project management
devices are placed to stand-in for (missing) answers to the questions that Kaplan & Norton
(1992) called for.
Intuitively, one might wonder whether these devices were intended or whether they “just”
resulted in consequence of the observations made by Kaplan & Norton when working with
practitioners4. The following textual analysis suggests that the project-focused scope of the
concept is inherent to the concept and that it was never designed to organize practice, but
instead that it depends on a project organization of its own.
4
Indeed, two other publications, respectively on action research (Kaplan, 1998 – P.108) and on the conceptual
foundations of the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan, 2009 – P.1264) portray that the scope of the concept was
developed in line with users’ adaptation of the concept. This claim does not contradict the argument presented
here based on the textual analysis. Merely, the textual analysis suggests that the publications by Kaplan &
Norton (2001, 2004, 2006, 2008) exclusively unfold and elaborate on the project organization that this concept
assumes and requires.
13
In their 2006 manuscript on alignment Kaplan & Norton introduce a so called Office of
Strategy Management, as the successor to the project teams implementing the concept,
initially. The purpose of this office is repeated in the 2008 manuscript with the introduction
that “the OSM work with the strategic theme owners to get their assessments and their colorcoding (green, yellow or red) of the performance of the theme’s objectives and portfolio of
strategic initiatives”. (Kaplan & Norton, 2008 – P.292). By itself, their labelling of managers
as “strategic theme owners” is novel. Arguably, such labels are not common in traditional
practice environments of manufacturing and/or sales/service organizations. It points to the
presence of particular tasks that require particular attention, rather than recurring practice. The
2006 manuscript introduce the Office of the Strategy Management as a social innovation,
discovered by Kaplan & Norton in corporate practice. A closer reading of the BSC texts
suggest that this discovery might not have been entirely co-incidental. As the table below
illustrates, the idea of it was introduced already in their first book publication.
1
(1996)
P.290
“We feel… that effective maintenance of the system is so important to its success that… it
should be in the hands of a single, qualified individual”
2
(1996)
P.291
“… At this time… the specific identity of the manager of the strategic management system is
unclear, but unless organizations place someone in this role, they may fail to capture all the
benefits from operating an integrated system.”
3
(2006)
P.254
“…a new role is emerging in organizations to manage strategy execution in a
comprehensive and integrated way… We call this new role the office of strategy
management (OSM). The new office is often the successor to the Balanced Scorecards
project team.
4
(2006)
P.254
“The OSM represent the natural evolution of the Balanced Scorecard from a project to an
ongoing alignment and governance process.”
5
(2008)
P.284
“We don’t advocate that the OSM either develop the strategy or have accountability for its
execution. Instead, the OSM is analogous to a military general’s chief of staff”
6
(2008)
P.296
“Perhaps the most important competency is being effective as a change agent. Leadership
and strategy execution requires change”
Table 4: Dating (in) the Office of Strategy Management
As the text exhibits make clear, the primary purpose of the OSM is to create focus on the need
for leadership and change. The vocabulary used around this construct renders operational
practice absent, but bring about the project as the natural means of organization. In
comparison, the texts do not engage the OSM with questions such as, to what extent a
thorough understanding of a business is ensured through the color-coding of a progressreports or, for that matter, in what ways that a separation of the management report and the
reporting affects organisational styles of accountability? (Taylor, 2010). In effect, the OSM in
important and particular ways disconnects the management control system from its
organisational environments. In practice, such disconnects ought to raise more questions than
the BSC texts answer. Regardless, Kaplan & Norton (2008 – P.303) promise that:
“Companies that follow the recommendations we have laid out in this book will have a
complete management system that helps them set clear strategic goals, allocate resources
consistent with those goals, set priorities for operational action, quickly recognize the
operational and strategic impact of those decisions, and, if necessary, update their strategic
goals.
(Kaplan & Norton (2008 – P.303)
14
Although such claim appears ambitious, this is not the concern of interest here. Instead,
attention is drawn to the ways that the OSM and related textual devices function and
remediate organizational presences and absences. A simple test question might be, what role
that managers occupy in organizations working with this concept?
In parallel, the manuscripts host a number of metaphors that respetively introduce how to
work with the Balanced Scorecard and how to work as a manager. Throughout the
manuscripts one finds references to managers as ‘cabin crews’ (1992); ‘architects (1996);
‘change agents’ (2001); ‘von Clausewitz’ – a bygone war strategist (2004) and ‘coxswains’
(2006). A commonality between all of these metaphors is that they position managers in roles
that go beyond day-to-day operations. In reverse, the final manuscript even makes this point
explicit by comparing the OSM to a “military general’s chief of staff” (see table 4 above).
Managers are there to develop strategies and be accountable for the execution of particular
projects. In the words of Kaplan & Norton (2001 – P.333): “Leaders who want to create
dramatic change in their organization will find the Balanced Scorecard a highly effective
management tool to motivate and accomplish the desired change”.
The textual functions introduced in this subsection illustrate a tension. In the BSC-texts
unspecific references to “management systems” and/or “strategic management systems”, by
which one would imagine routines of practice, are contrasted by a call for managerial agency
that focuses primarily on discontinuity and change. Moreover, rather than to place the object
within an organizational setting, the texts suggest placing the BSC in a separate environment
that is guided by project management rather than recursive practices. By this organization,
the BSC texts appear to function in ways that both disconnects BSC performance
management from organizational performance measurement practices and re-associates it
with project management. However, although the manuscripts emphasize progressive
leadership, they, nevertheless, instruct the reader/user into a subordinate role. The step-bystep accounts introduced emphasize how users can serve the object, rather than to discuss how
the use of the object facilitates various agencies. Stated differently, textual functions organize
actors to con-template the production of the object in highly structured ways. On this basis,
the following section illustrates the ways that manuscripts introduce and justify the use of
(consulting) templates. As the third and final step to the intertextual analysis it explores, how
the agencies, discussed here, become related to the object, analysed initially.
3.3. Interpersonal Functions
Kaplan & Norton often motivate their manuscripts and the development of the BSC with
reference to practice observations and/or initiatives. Moreover, these references are also used
to produce source authority, which in turn are used to justify the introduction of project
management methods - the idea of “industry templates”, in particular. A template is a profile,
or inventory, of things supposedly often considered and/or that are made subject to change.
As showed in the following, they are used to goal-set the relation of object and agency and at
the same to preclude critical reflection on the purpose and use of BSCs in organizational
practice.
The ’96 manuscript attributes the development of the Balanced Scorecard to a business
roundtable initiated by Kaplan & Norton. The introduction states that a “dozen companies
meeting by-monthly throughout 1990 to develop a new performance measurement model”
(Kaplan & Norton, 1996 – P.vii). However, one manager from one company is emphasized in
particular, because of his leadership – an Art Schneiderman from the firm Analog Devices. As
offered to the reader, it was the groups discussion of his work – and the work of others that
15
“led to an expansion of the scorecard to what we labelled the Balanced Scorecard” (Kaplan
& Norton, 1996 – P.viii).
From an editorial point of view, named references promote credibility, and possibly even
identification with the message. However, in their manuscripts cases do not speak for
themselves, at least not in the sense that they report struggles with the object and/or agencies,
their contextualisation etc. Instead, they usually promote and contextualize source authority as
practice-based. Most case examples, in that sense, are followed by elaborations on authors
learning outcomes. The table below offers three such examples.
1
(2001)
P.69
“When we first formulated the Balanced Scorecard… we let the story of strategy emerge
onto the four perspectives through executive interview... We have now analyzed the
hundreds of…scorecards built…and have mapped the patterns into a framework we call the
strategy map”
2
(2004)
P.203
“We have examined the learning and growth perspective of several hundred maps and
Balanced Scorecards. Six objectives consistently appeared…”
3
(2006)
P.146
Based on our experience with dozens of information technology organizations, we have
prepared the generic IT department strategy template shown in Figure… This map illustrates
the balance that IT organisations must maintain
Table 5: Intertextual Functions positioning Kaplan & Norton’s Authority
It is common to all three examples that broad practice references (“several hundreds of…”)
point to source authority (“we have analyzed; we have examined…; we have prepared…”)
which then transfers the reader over to learn about rhetorical devices such as a “frameworks”,
“objectives” or “templates”. Frameworks and templates are not things per se, but they inform
about issues to consider when doing something, as illustrated, for example, by the 2nd and 3rd
quote referring to specific objectives and specific balances that organisations must maintain.
However, templates also bias work. In helping practitioners to short-cut their reflection
process, they inscribe management to a very particular way of relating objects and agencies.
In the words of Kaplan & Norton (2001, P.97): “The template is the starting point for the
design process that then gets tailored… The templates help executive teams describe their
strategies and improve exponentially the quality of their insights. They facilitate greater
precision in defining the customer value proposition and increase awareness… Templates
also foster a cause-and-effect mentality that encourages more innovative approaches to
strategy implementation”. Stated differently, templates help those implementing a BSC
through the process of getting managers to do and/or develop things – such as value
propositions; cause-effect mentality etc. In so doing, they inform organisations that
performance management work can be contemplated, for example, in terms of such task-lists
discussed previously.
In the representation of the BSC-texts, templates can be justified purely as an economic
measure. Thus, for example, Kaplan & Norton (2001 – P.357) suggest that: “With more
experience during the past five years, and with templates relevant for particular strategies
and particular industries, the initial process can now be shortened by 50 percent or more
from the sixteen weeks typically required in 1996”. In parallel, however, templates also
transpose the object-agency relation into a context, in which the quality or success of their
association depends on the extent to which templates are used to reconsider practice in terms
of what it is not. Templates do not take point of departure in local practices, but rather in
“generic styles of otherness”. They goal-set, what firms should do to implement “best
practice” – whatever that is. Thereby, however, they also relate agencies and objects to an
16
ontology that is void of ongoing, recurring practice, but which instead takes point of departure
in a projectable world, in which radical discontinuity is used frequently to drive change from
a clear beginning to a pre-set end5. From this perspective, it appears as indeed a very open and
honest statement of opinion, when Kaplan & Norton (2006 - P.267)offer the following
observation:
We often are asked how to weight the measures in a Balanced Scorecard. Such a question
may be a sign that the organization does not truly understand the Balanced Scorecard
management system…
The interpersonal functions analysed here suggest that the so-called Balanced Scorecard
management system is a label for a particular consulting approach. With point of departure in
a firms’ performance measurement practice, it redefines managers (incremental) approaches
to performance improvements by the introduction of an iconic object – the Balanced
Scorecard – and the parallel instruction on ways to create change management focused
projects. Success stories emphasizing leadership skills are used to defocus from the missing
explanation of what BSC work entails. On this basis, the question is what “performance
management” the Balanced Scorecard way has to do with strategic management accounting?
In order to address this question, the following discussion addresses first the presences crafted
and the absences rendered opaque. Then it discusses their significance for the ways of
understanding performance management - not in, but – as a practice. Finally, it addresses the
contribution of intertextual analysis to management accounting research by a discussion of
how the observations made here might be of relevance to further empirical research - case
studies, in particular.
4.
Discussion
The previous sections’ analysis of ideational, textual and interpersonal functions sheds light
on three aspects of the texts by Kaplan & Norton (1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008). As
mentioned previously, ideational functions project how the Balanced Scorecard is framed as
an object (or concept). In comparison, textual functions project how interaction with the
concept is organized. This aspect concerns the ways that texts account for agencies, or vice
versa leave them unaccounted for. Finally, interpersonal functions project the modes of
management, by which a relation between the Balanced Scorecard (object) and particular
agencies is linked.
The first of the following three discussions summarizes these insights in terms of the question,
what it is that works for the Balanced Scorecard. It focuses on the characteristics of the
object-subject relationship that the texts project, and also the critical success factors that they
establish as relevant for the reader. In turn, the second section addresses, how this body of
information package challenges organizations managing with key performance measures.
Two observations motivate this discussion. Kaplan & Norton’s re-presentations of
management give illustration to ways in which performance management paradoxically is
forged as a ‘non-practice’ – something that does not work in general, but only within the
particular confines of a project. In parallel, their re-presentations of performance give
In his essay on action research, Kaplan (1998 – P.108) discusses how the implementation process was accelerated by the
association with Norton’s consulting group, and submits that a significant reason explaining the rapid diffusion of the concept
– or as stated in his essay: “the more rapid advance of knowledge was the leverage from Norton’s consulting company, for
which the balanced scorecard represented a major deliverable (and differentiator)… We now had a team of knowledgeable
consultants working with skilled creative managers”.
5
17
illustration to ways in which firm performance is simulated as a performance of change
management.
Discursive
Resources
that text:
Ideational
Functions
…re-accentuates
Re-presentation
of Management
Information on
critical success
factors
Re-presentation
of “Performance”
Amendment to GoalSeeking Process based
on Organisation‘s
Short-Term Priorities
Individual Leadership
is emphasized through
frequent references to
actor/organizations
Radical change is
important, yet an
organisation should
focus on quick wins
The emergent and
negotiated character
of perf mngmt change
backgrounded by its
extreme alternatives
performance management
as plastic in between
strategy and structure
Specific investments in
form - step by step
accounts – shift away
attention from practice
Practice references
produce source authority
that in turn jusitfies the
use of project methods
Leadership is crucial for
success. Nevertheless,
the concept should be
developed beyond the
day to day organization
Relations between
management conduct
and firm performance
rendered opaque
Organizational constructs
reposition performance
management beyond
day-to-day practice in a
project environment
Templates projecting
„otherness“ are used
to motivate radical
change - rather than
gradual improvements
Templates developed for
consulting (project
management) purposes
help firms know what to
focus on in practice
Consulting templates
offer virtual alternatives
that „push“ users to
begin thinking about
distances rather than
transformation/purpose
process as certain and
linear rather than fluid and
driven by uncertainty
Managerial role informed
via metaphors that
emphasize both teamwork and event work
with clear beginning /end
Practice questions
virtually absent, or
positioned as inferior
to project management
Visuals and/or narratives
must emphasize form
over matter and design
a clear beginning and end
Visuals & metaphors
focusing on managerial
coaching & delegating
substitute task with a
role focus
Performance Management
introduced as a narrative
articulation of hypotheses,
that enables change when
framed as a linear project
Specific investments in
form coupled with diffuse
role metaphors are used
to subordinate actors in
relation to the concept
Projectable, unspecific
forms of con-templation
replace a focus on the
premises and unfolding of
accounting change
Artefact
Simulation of
firm performance
as performance of
change management
Absence of the object
and/or the context
variables of performance
management in local
settings
The fluidity of process
and unknown dynamics
of interaction is
rendered opaque
Emphasis on individual
leadership and linear
consulting styles render
opaque questions that
concern managerial duties
Performance
Management
forged as a
„non-practice“
An aesthetic
that stimulates
demand for it
by the absence of
any resemblance
Narrative approach to
Business Modeling via
hypothetical lead-lag
indicators (cause/effect)
performance
management by the
Graphics that lay out the
introduction of:
performance management
Information on
Object-Subject
Relationships
Interpersonal
Functions
Multiplicity of prior
concepts re-presented
as tools promoting radical
change management
…draws on
management ideas
in order to:
Contextualization of
…modifies control
system logic by
means of:
Textual
Functions
Table 6: The Balanced Scorecard Instructing Performance Management
By these observations, the third and final discussion addresses the conclusion that the artefact
created by Kaplan & Norton is best understood as an aesthetic that stimulates demand for
itself by skilfully crafted absences of any resemblance. Performance management – the
Balanced Scorecard way – replaces the object with a form, a “quasi-object; suppresses most
but a few agencies; and is driven by the fantasy of systems implementation work, when it
comes to its linking of objects and subjects. This concept, may not have (m)any virtues
(Noerreklit, 2000), but its aesthetics are significant beyond fads and fashions, because they
give illustration to the ways that the ongoing articulation of “managerial desirealism” reifies
performance management as a supermodernist work of art – a simulacrum. If at all, the
Balanced Scorecard texts inform only loosely organizational work with key performance
measures. First and foremost, they provide this type of work with a story – an artefact that
actors in organizations can use to address, what a local practice is not and/or does not entail.
4.1. What works for the Balanced Scorecard?
Based on the previous analysis, one can point to three characteristics that works for the
Balanced Scorecard. First, the Balanced Scorecard texts avoid addressing an object of
management. None of the manuscripts analysed here engage with the question, how “the
balance” between various decentered resources and perspectives becomes a management
object – once all hypotheses have been articulated and associated. In lieu of such focus, the
texts inform readers about the ways that such articulation and association should be framed
via iterative processes, by which objectives and targets can be addressed top down and
18
matched with measures and initiatives bottom-up. In addition, the texts introduce to a variety
of graphics for use in this process and that as iconic forms themselves stand-in for the lack of
object. By the combination of these quasi-objects and the focus on the creation of
organizational iterations, the Balanced Scorecard maintains a soft core that over time has
proven flexible enough to span beyond the initial scorecard onto strategy maps, alignment
points etc.
The second of three characteristics is that the Balanced Scorecard is highly specific about the
type of agency that the concept presumes. Rather than to situate the concept in practice, the
manuscripts situate the concept in a reality of its own – a project. By so doing, it is possible
both to maintain the imagination of (accounting) change, yet never to address the ontology of
such change processes. Instead, all manuscripts take point of departure in an epistemology of
project management, which frames itself in terms of a clear beginning and end with a number
of steps in between. These accounts narrativize movement, and they subordinate readers/users
to serve the concept. Moreover, these guidelines that instruct users on the (order of) things to
be done at certain times also craft stability in the relation between authors and readers. Hereby,
the question of agency is settled once and for all. The Balanced Scoreard texts inform by
instructing their readers how to operate a project manual. Even if this manual remains
unspecific and broad, it simulates certainty of purpose by imagining an unfolding of events.
The final characteristic that the analysis illustrates, is that the Balanced Scorecard through
numerous broad references to practice promise a (virtual) space for exercising individual
leadership. When references are made to practitioners in the manuscripts, these emphasize
their leadership. In parallel, the manuscripts make this role appear easy by the promise of
templates that supposedly summarize the focus of different types of firms in different types of
industries. Hereby, the relation of the concept quasi-object and the agency of the user is
represented as a process of con-templation – reflection by lay-outs that prestructure thought
processes and decision-making.
Alongside these three characteristics - that in various ways draw-on broader management
ideas, modify and/or reaccentuate the idea of performance management – the manuscripts
inform readers on the critical success factors of Balanced Scorecard work. The most
significant feature of this information is that it tends to broaden rather than to narrow down
the messages offered in the manuscripts. Thus, for example, at the same time as performance
management is introduced as a change management project, the manuscripts also emphasize
that it is important to focus on so-called “quick wins”. As already mentioned, the manuscripts
emphasize practice leadership. Nevertheless, they also suggest placing the Balanced
Scorecard project beyond the day-to-day operations. Templates that were developed for
project management purposes, help firms knowing what to focus on in practice etc. The
following third discussion on the supermodernity of performance management elaborates on
this point – the seemingly all-inclusiveness of the Balanced Scorecard. The question
discussed in the following section is whether and how these characteristics of an artefact
challenge organizations managing with key performance measures
4.2. Does this artefact challenge KPM management?
As Kaplan & Norton (1992) explain, one of the intentions of the Balanced Scorecard was
from the very beginning to challenge the way firms work with key performance measures.
Organisations should place strategy and vision at the centre of their attention, rather than to
focus on performance measures, as if they had meaning in and of themselves. Over the years
this challenge was developed by Kaplan & Norton in their writing of subsequent manuscripts.
19
Today, it seems that their challenge no longer appears as controversial, as it possibly did
twenty years ago. However, the intertextual analysis suggests that the Balanced Scorecard twenty years after its introduction - challenges the idea of KPM management in ways that
possibly are not intended; that definitely are not immediately apparent, but that certainly are
significant. In short, the things that work for the Balanced Scorecard also constitute issues that
can not per se work for and in organizations.
On an organizational level, the absence of an object – coupled vice versa, with the presence of
graphical forms standing in for the lack of object – do not make it apparent, how focus is
brought about in the processes of initiating, implementing and managing with a Balanced
Scorecard. Kaplan & Norton (1996) suggest that objectives ultimately should be defined in
relation to shareholders’ interest. However, the translation from generic shareholder interests
in additional return on investment, economic value added etc into particular objectives is
never addressed, explicitly. Stated differently, the suggestion that firms place strategy at the
centre of their attention, may inform intuitively about the ways that the Balanced Scorecard
intends to differ from a traditional focus on key performance measures. However, it does not
inform about the ways that objectives in their very simplest form, such as for example ‘better
planning’, ‘more automation’ ‘less reporting’ could play a role in local fabrications of a
Balanced Scorecard object.
Instead, the manuscripts promise templates for different types of firms in different types of
industries, as if these templates as ‘virtual alternatives’ to a local practice can offer firm focus
on the object motivating the work with key performance measures. It remains an empirical
question to explore in what ways Balanced Scorecards are constituted if brought about
without an object, and with what effects. However, practical examples are meanwhile
common of organizations that in working with the Balanced Scorecard have placed the desire
for increased shareholder return, where an object could have been defined, and/or that have
designed systems that stipulate a request for additional performance on every possible key
performance measurement already present in the organization. Another empirical question is
if and/or how managers in such organizations have read and interpreted the Balanced
Scorecard manuscripts. Meanwhile, the intertextual analysis illustrates how the reference to
templates in these manuscripts does little to focus the reader on the definition of his/her
purpose. Instead, they reaccentuate performance management in such ways that the
manuscripts make readers/users think that it is possible to measure up their own performance
management in terms of a distance between the local practice and generalized templates.
As already discussed, the Balanced Scorecard foregrounds individual leadership as important.
The second challenge to KPM management relates to this foregrounding. Although the
manuscripts subordinate managerial agency in the service of the Balanced Scorecard, they do
not say much about the content of the tasks and duties that the Balanced Scorecard imposes
on managers. Visuals and metaphorical circumscriptions liken managers to a number of
service professions – as for example the cabin crew. But in so doing, the manuscripts replace
a task focus with a role focus. As already discussed, they emphasize individual conduct within
the boundaries of a project and give outline to the steps that fall in between beginning and end.
However, the question remains largely silenced, what managers do when working with a
Balanced Scorecard? In particular, the manuscripts explicitly do not address practice beyond
the project. As discussed, they even suggest situating Balanced Scorecard management in an
organization of its own. In consequence, performance management the Balanced Scorecard
way unties work with key performance measures from day to day operations.
In consequence of the challenges on the organizational and individual levels, finally the third
challenge concerns the question how the Balanced Scorecard is inscribed into management.
20
As the intertextual analysis illustrated previously, interpersonal functions in the manuscripts
emphasize mainly the templates and the leadership aspects discussed already. They suggest
that organization and individuals by filling out intended roles will bring about change.
However, the emergent and negotiated character of organizational change is rendered opaque
by the emphasis of its extreme alternatives – revolutionary or radical change and so-called
‘quick wins’. Whereas the latter typically focuses on the possibilities for minor and typically
mundane improvements over status quo, the former suggests that change is to come about as
an exercise in redrawing organizations. In each their own way, both approaches assume that
organizations work according to a design and can move easily from point A to B. Doing so
they both de-emphasize the fluidity of organizational processes including unknown dynamics
and outcomes of interaction that result on an ongoing basis and by which organizations
change. Rather than to place the Balanced Scorecard in these processes, the intertextual
analysis illustrates that the manuscripts place the idea of organization in a vacuum. Thus, for
example, the manuscripts do not engage with questions such as, how an organization will
know if it is time to develop a Balanced Scorecard; when it is time to replace one Balanced
Scorecard with another – or for that matter with some thing else. The questions remain
empirical of course. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge that the concept emphasizes change,
yet offers only an epistemology for change management rather than to address the ontology of
change, more broadly.
These three challenges contrast in interesting ways the things that work for the Balanced
Scorecard, as already discussed. In sum, they suggest that the Balanced Scorecard is forged as
a “non-practice”. The intertextual analysis illustrates how its performance is simulated first
and foremost through change management performativities. The presences it brings about
emphasize a project reality, which contrasts practice, which it in turn renders absent from the
text. In these ways, the intertextual analysis helps illustrate how particular aesthetic properties
stimulate demand for the Balanced Scorecard, and how they in curious ways do so less by the
promise of effects than by the absence of any resemblance. The challenges discussed here
give illustration to this absence. Paradoxically, it is exactly these absences that help make the
Balanced Scorecard ‘real’.
4.3. SuperModernity of Performance Management
In exploring what it is that works for the Balanced Scorecard, and how it challenges
management, the previous sections have analysed and discussed the presences and absences
brought about. In sum, they suggest that the Balanced Scorecard as conceptualized by Kaplan
& Norton does not reproduce practice. Instead, the Balanced Scorecard crafts a simulation of
a practice equivalent that places performance management, where it is not. As illustrated, the
concept manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton consistently place the Balanced Scorecard in a
project with a clear beginning and end, rather than in a recurring practice.
Nevertheless, the templates, the visual graphics, the step-by-step accounts alongside the many
different references to other concepts are important. They produce a particular heuristic that
helps to make performance management imaginable – as a project with various steps etc. The
more they mediate and simulate an equivalent to corporate key performance management
practice, the clearer they produce a desirable imagination. In the past, these various devices
have often been overlooked next to the visuals by which the Balanced Scorecard is recognized.
However, as the present analysis has shown, the ideational, textual and interpersonal text
features draw on various management concepts, mediate them and use them to re-accentuate
management work with key performance measures. Doing so, they fabricate reasons that
21
supplement the visuals offering the Balanced Scorecard iconic appearance. In combination
they offer a mass of reproductions that allows the concept to appear as ‘real’.
However, ‘real’ does not imply a resemblance to practice. Merely, the Balanced Scorecard is
real because it offers an equivalent to practice. As discussed, this reproduction is based on
particular features that work for the concept, but which by because of its settlement of
presences and absences challenge and trouble management with key performance measures as practice, at least. However, the Balanced Scorecard can be drawn on intellectually as a
fantasy that collects and bring together a great variety of desires heard and/or articulated by
Kaplan & Norton while working with various companies. Each additional manuscript by
Kaplan & Norton has added a layer of factishness to the concept, which have contributed to
make it real beyond mere simulation. As coined by Deleuze & Guattari, 1983 – P.30): “desire
produces reality, or stated another way, desiring production is one and the same thing as a
social production”.
In consequence, it might be wrong simply to describe the Balanced Scorecard as a
classificatory device, or a boundary object (Hansen & Mouritsen, 1999), because this label by
Star & Griesemer first and foremost suggest that the Balanced Scorecard is wide enough that
we can all find ourselves within it. In comparison, the present analysis suggest that it finding
oneself in the manuscripts is an extraordinarily difficult affair because the manuscripts and the
concept does not represent practice, it reproduces it in terms of desirables – ‘nice to haves’
that as in a fantasy require no prioritization. By the systematization of these nice to haves and
the fabrication of fantasy, the Balanced Scorecard brings about supermodern (desirable)
reality and makes it available to everyone on the management scene. Its wishful thinking does
neither constitute an immutable mobile, nor does it intend to do so. The Balanced Scorecard
intends to stimulate demand for itself by a production of desires that evolve alongside such
trends in and/or features from practice that the concept is able to pick up and ex-corporate
from the local into a global expanding framework, that with each publication by Kaplan &
Norton (1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008…) appears more and more real. As Hansen &
Mouritsen (1999) reported, a respondent of theirs made a distinction between local efforts and
global Balanced Scorecard ‘theory’.
However, as this practitioner probably knew, the Balanced Scorecard does not offer classical
theory that explains and/or frames an explanation. In contrast, the Balanced Scorecard offers
supermodern theory - a repository of ideas that users can both draw on as they like, and use
flexibly, with one exception. Users can never reproduce ‘the Balanced Scorecard’ in its
entirety. Any reproduction is bound to be localized and therefore different from the theory,
the factish representation that the Balanced Scorecard crafts. In consequence, it is also
impossible to assess, whether the Balanced Scorecard works. It always works – and even
when it turns out not to work out for firms the intended way, such localizations can neither
verify, nor falsify the Balanced Scorecards’ theory of desirable realities. Local failure and/or
success is bound to be local. It may parallel the concept in certain ways, for example by
drawing on some its graphics, but the experiment of working with a Balanced Scorecard can
never make the fantasy of it, unreal. Irregardless of what practitioners do, it is a fact that the
Balanced Scorecard has coined performance management as an idea and with a certain set of
ideas on content. In consequence, the success and significance of a supermodern management
theory also depends increasingly less on what users do with it, and vice versa increasingly
more on the ability of it to reproduce (perfectly) that which already has been crafted
(imperfectly) in practice. In consequence, working with supermodernist theories we should
not wonder, why it is that practical applications often draw only in limited ways on the
concept itself (see for example, Ittner & Larcker, 1998). When and where practitioners do
22
something, supermodernist theories and theorists draw on it in their reproduction of facts.
Supermodernist production needs no virtues and no particular resemblance. It needs only
aesthetics that can please and make real the desires and/or fantasies caught onto, one way or
the other. In summary, performance management is real, because it has been made desirable.
5.
Conclusions
This paper started out by the observation that often we find management concepts explained
only at a very high level and in quite traditional ways – as fads and fashion –something that
comes and goes and therefore is not worthwhile spending all too much time with on the
detailed level of their text. In line with this perspective there are even those, who – following
a performative apporoach – caution us against the trap of subjecting social analysis to a metalanguage, by which arbitrary building blocks and definitions are imposed on the social. In
consequence, it seems that little time has ever been spent on the texts by which management
concepts become a public good. Nevertheless, texts matter somehow. They inform the
discourse by which concept become known, become adopted and/or abandoned. But, why
should we disengage from certain parts of the discourse within which practitioners - and for
that matter we, as researchers, work?
In order to find out what it is that works for the Balanced Scorecard, and further if and how
these features challenge management, this paper used intertextual analysis to deconstruct the
Balanced Scorecard manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton (1992, 1996, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008)
It focused on three types of functions of their manuscripts, more specifically A/ the ways that
ideas are introduced, B/ the ways that texts are organized and C/ the ways that the concept is
inscribed to management. On this basis, it was found that the question what it is that works for
the Balanced Scorecard can be brought down to three particular features.
First, the manuscripts by Kaplan & Norton introduce no object of focus. Instead, a number of
forms are used to stand-in for the lack of object, which releases the concept from specifying
“its” focus. Secondly, the manuscripts do not explicitly invite actors to work with the
Balanced Scorecard in a variety of vice. On the contrary, actors are consistently inscribed to
very specific task and roles that subordinate their agency in the service of the object. Finally,
the Balanced Scorecard manuscripts promise and emphasize repeatedly a space for individual
leadership, and situate this promise in an elaborate project/change management methodology.
The intertextual analysis shows, how the Balanced Scorecard in order to present its arguments
draws on, modifies and re-accentuate a variety of resources. By so doing it shows how this
concept, though in lack of (m)any virtues, offer aesthetics that in curious ways serve to
stimulate demand for the concept in spite of the absence of any resemblance to practice. Thus,
for example, the analysis suggests that performance management (the Balanced Scorecard
way) does not extend performance measurement practice. It is an invention all on its own that
appears real first and foremost because it has been made desirable by the Balanced Scorecard.
The problem about this and other inventions of the Balanced Scorecard is that they do not
represent practice. They reproduce it, but reproduce it in ways that the result is a “nonpractice”. The Balanced Scorecard promotes performance management in shape of a project
with a clear beginning and end, but never addresses a recurring practice managed by key
performance measures. Moreover, the project shape is promoted with such a wealth of detail
that the Balanced Scorecard can never be reproduced in its entirety. The Balanced Scorecard
may inspire and inform practice, but it does not develop practice. It develops only itself by
reproducing, systematizing and coordinating such desires that over time have been extracted
23
from practice. In consequence of this desiring production, the Balanced Scorecard is hard to
dispute. It has made itself a fact.
24
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