CAMPO TIPO DESCRIPCIÓN ND

In summary, DAFS for years operated under a different measurement regime. Employees focused on collecting child support payments and measured their

performance based on the total amount they collected from year to year. An increase in total collection from the previous year was enough to declare their GP and for leadership to rally the troops so they can keep collecting more. Their version of GP collapsed when the media, citing a third-party audit report, announced their poor performance under the FPM framework and noted their appalling position in state rankings. This provocation from the media took DAFS employees by surprise, causing them huge disappointment and embarrassment. The media’s reporting on DAFS’ poor performance, however, was made possible by a consulting firm’s processing of state-level performance scores published by OCSE. Although OCSE does not rank states, its public reporting of performance scores became a powerful device for enrolling allies who could circulate and mobilize the FPMs. The

publication of performance scores, thus, enabled entities to notice the high and low performing states, encouraged their ordering, revealed differences captured by their distances in a shared metric (Espeland & Lom, 2015; Espeland & Stevens, 1998), and created the competitive space (Pollock & D'Adderio, 2012) that put DAFS at the bottom of the pit.

Using the media and audit reports, DAFS’ new leader drew employees’ attention to the FPMs, marking the beginning of DAFS’ transformation so the FPMs’

102 GP can be valued and made valuable. It began by making the measures known

through an assemblage of experts who articulated and mobilized the GP that must be enacted. The new Operations Director introduced individual performance standards or

stats to encourage employees to focus on actions that count. Innovation Teams evaluated best practices to establish what matters so they can be valorized (Vatin, 2013). The management analyst provided training on the FPMs and offered a

framework for knowing and acting the ‘good’. DAFS IT developed reporting tools to help employees identify cases requiring their good work. Thus, through leaders and experts’ articulation of the FPMs, a new measured ‘good’ finally emerged. For their articulation of the ‘good’ to hold, employees’ roles and tasks were visibly organized into specialized functional units, framing the boundaries of their work in light of the measures. Tools and devices were installed to contain and steer people, tasks, and cases towards the FPMs’ valued ‘good’. DAFS’ sociotechnical agencement (Callon, 1998a, 2007) gradually emerged, containing and supporting their GP. Hence, through experts’ articulations of the ‘good’, employees’ reorganization into specialized units, and the installation of systems and devices to contain cases, tasks, and people, these

values practices (Gehman, et al., 2013) helped DAFS’ employees establish and define the GP that must be enacted.

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6

Organizational ‘shake-up’ to produce the ‘good’

6.1 Introduction

The previous chapter shows how DAFS’ ‘rude awakening’ triggered the introduction of the FPMs. Under the new leadership, experts gathered to organize employees, cases, and tasks, aided by tools and devices, and make the FPMs’ ‘good’ known and valued. In this chapter, I discuss how DAFS’ knowledge of the FPMs continued to evolve as employees, devices, and other entities reassembled and reorganized themselves into a coordinated and circumscribed entity to value and perform the ‘good’. Here I describe how the FPMs intervened in the local agency’s framing effort to qualify and position (Callon, et al., 2002) the various entities or

actants (Latour, 1996) that would allow a measurement network to emerge. The qualification and positioning involved a process of translation (Callon, 1986), where the measures’ meanings are articulated and inscribed in these actants to establish and shape their interactions and actively promote the construction of GP. The central point of this chapter is how roles, tasks, employees, activities, tools, and other devices are defined, negotiated, positioned, and coordinated to enable them to perform or enact the FPMs. I discuss the installation of mediating devices (e.g. process maps,

flowcharts, tracking devices, and reporting instruments) that demarcated DAFS’ operational boundaries and bound together the measures and their prescribed GP so it can be valued and acted upon. I then present how these and other devices made the measures known and visible, formatted DAFS’ activities, and ‘put [the organization] in motion’ (Callon, 2016: 31) so they can keep producing a rearticulated ‘good’ (GP2.1). The increased visibility of measures and their circulation through various forms and accounting inscriptions (Qu & Cooper, 2011) helped in the mobilization of the FPMs so they can mediate action – i.e. GP. The measures’ intervention, however, never seemed to stop as new actors and devices get incorporated, requiring further qualification and positioning of DAFS’ assemblage. Thus, throughout these mobilization and framing efforts, I show how measures played a central role in shaking up the organization in pursuit of change.

The chapter is presented as follows. It begins with a discussion of the

104 the FPMs and newly articulated GP. It then describes the process involved in

qualifying what counts as ‘good’ and establishing the context in which they are expected to occur. The chapter then describes the process involved in materializing the qualified good through the development of various mechanisms promoting and enabling the GP to be known, observed, and valued. Finally, it describes how the measures’ circulation and mobilization at DAFS transformed employees and their practices in ways that reflect their connections with the measures.