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Topical and taking a bold stance in the contentious debate surrounding performance in the public sector, this thoroughly revised and updated second edition, packed full of new features, shows readers how performance thinking has a substantial impact on the management of public organizations.

In its report published in 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (known as the '9/11 Commission') analyses the functioning of the Intelligence Community (ICo). It indicates that the ICo is both over-fragmented and guilty of not sharing enough information. The Commission recommends that central control of the ICo needs to be strengthened and that more incentives for information-sharing should be designed. This article takes a critical look at these two recommendations. Sharing information carries major risks and is therefore not something that can take place as a matter of course. Moreover, information has to be subject to a selection process before it can be shared. This selection cannot be measured objectively, so mistakes in the selection are unavoidable. Strengthening central control also poses risks: it engenders more battles over territory, it does not improve understanding of the capillaries of the organization - the capillaries being where the primary processes of information gathering, validation and assessment take place - and it involves the destruction of checks and balances. Fragmentation may even be functional since it leads to redundancy, itself a safeguard against the risk of misselecting relevant information.

PurposeDecision making in networks is multilateral and interaction‐based and is often contrasted with unilateral decision making in a hierarchy. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether unilateral interventions can nevertheless be functional in networks.Design/methodology/approachA large number of empirical studies into decision making in networks were consulted to examine whether they featured unilateral interventions and, if so, what the roles of these interventions were. Prior to this, the author outlines theories on decision making in networks and the dysfunctions of unilateral interventions.FindingsSix strategies were found in which unilateral interventions proved effective in network‐like decision making. Unilateral action may be used to influence other actors' perceptions of the win‐win game, to change the pattern of interdependencies, as a follow‐up to failed interaction, if room is offered simultaneously, if there is a critical mass of winners and to de‐hierarchize decision making. These unilateral strategies were found to be embedded in interaction‐based, network‐like decision making. In some cases, they stimulated a process of interaction; in other cases, they resulted from a process of interaction.Practical implicationsThe strategies show that decision making in networks benefits from the intelligent use of unilateral action.Originality/valueThe paper goes beyond the dichotomy between network and hierarchy and demonstrates that, on the interface of networks and hierarchies, there are many possibilities of developing strategies that – although unilateral – are network‐contingent.

Many public, professional organizations have introduced performance measurement systems in the belief that they will lead to a transparent organization, offering incentives for performance and able to account for its performance. These systems produce a large number of perverse effects, however. The article presents five successive strategies aimed at preventing these effects where possible: tolerating competing product definitions; banning a monopoly on interpreting production figures; limiting the functions of and forums for performance measurement; strategically limiting the products that can be subjected to performance measurement; and using a process perspective of performance in addition to a product perspective.