Trials of explicitness in the implementation of public management reform

We study how state practitioners account for the shape and action of the state. We focus on the implementation, from the early 2000s onwards, of a reform of public management in France which called for a revision of the description of the boundaries and achievements of the action of the state. The reform targeted the rules governing the budgetary process and included, along with new accounting methods, new forms of reporting and assessment aimed at identifying the performance of governmental and administrative action. We consider the implementation process as a set of trials of explicitness in which a number of state practitioners struggled to elucidate the meaning of the reform and were confronted with pragmatic interrogations on what the state is and does. We analyze, using archival material, a number of such trials in the domain of national science and research policy, focusing on the development of managerial vocabularies and performance metrics.

► Develops the notion of trial of explicitness in management and accounting reform.
► Provides a case study on New Public Management in France.
► Examines performance measures in science and technology policy.