Public Action: Quest for Performance and Loss of Meaning. Providing Insight through Tensions of Governance
In recent years, public bodies in OECD countries have been facing a paradox. In their quest for performance, they have embarked on reforms that ultimately result in public action losing its meaning for their agents and users. In order to understand this paradox, we shall examine an intervention research initiative conducted over four years in a commune in Ile-de-France. It enables us to propose a quadratic model of the performance of public action, presenting it as a social construct driven by governance tensions that are themselves fuelled by different viewpoints.