While the performance meeting is a process of knowledge production, it only hints at the content of such knowledge. Performance markers are needed to guide the meeting, determine the content of the probationary report, and thus give meaning to the appraisee. This is where the competencies model makes its first appearance within the appraisal framework to create such meaning. Like the onboarding process, it does so by connecting individual performance to the court’s efficiency and wider success.797
The core competencies model appears in full-length form in another 2013 Administrative Instruction. Over 16 pages, it lists seven core competencies which form the basic criteria against which staff performance is to be recorded and assessed (see Appendix B). As mentioned previously, the competencies model requires the professional to demonstrate ‘dedication to the mission and values’, ‘professionalism’, ‘teamwork’, ‘learning and development’, ‘handling uncertain situations’, ‘interaction’, and the ability to ‘realis[e] objectives’.798 Each of these competencies follows an identical format: first, it summarises the
794 Findley and Newton, ‘Re-framing Foucault’, 215; Townley, Reframing Human Resource Management, 109–
11.
795 Townley, Reframing Human Resource Management, 200–1; Townley, ‘Foucault, Power/Knowledge, and its
Relevance for Human Resource Management’, 536. This is in keeping with one official’s observation that within the organisation ‘there is no big brother’ and that performance and expectations must be ultimately managed by oneself, ICC Interview 5, 27 August 2018.
796 These two effects broadly correspond to ‘technologies of power’ and ‘technologies of the self’ as discussed in
M. Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’, L. Martin et al. (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault (University of Massachusetts Press 1988) 16.
797 See chapter 2.3.2.
798 ICC, Performance Appraisal System, ICC/AI/2013/003, 6 March 2013 (‘AI on PAS’), Annex: The Core
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competency and its importance to the court’s effectiveness; second, it provides a ‘general definition’ of the competency translated in ‘behavioural terms’ to allow the competency to be detected in specific circumstances; third, it sets the standard to which the appraisee will be held according to their level of seniority; and fourth, it lists positive and negative ‘behavioural indicators’ to determine whether the appraisee has met the competency in practice.
By way of example, the ‘professionalism’ competency reasons that to conduct ‘fair public trials the Court needs strong strategic and analytical core capacity’.799 This capacity, according to the court, will only be met by staff who are professional and who know ‘how the ICC organisation works’.800 In ‘behavioural terms’, professionalism means being able to apply ‘professional and technical expertise’, to ‘keep[] abreast of organisational issues’ and to produce ‘workable solutions to a range of problems’.801 Given the Legal Officer is employed in a professional rather than a managerial category, they will ideally apply their ‘specialist skills in [their] own work’, share expertise, understand the organisation’s ‘structure, goals and capabilities’, and be an employee who ‘identifies, uncovers and solves problems’.802 Positive behavioural indicators of professionalism include advising others on appropriate courses of action, clarifying actions, collecting all the evidence, and ‘reach[ing] the right conclusions’.803 Conversely, negative indicators include a failure to conduct ‘appropriate analysis or examination prior to decision-making’ and ‘tak[ing] things at face value’.804 Under this and other competencies staff are to be measured and optimised.
The ideal professional which emerges from the competencies model is the efficient technocrat. They discharge and improve the provision of justice institutionally and see themselves as the ‘piecemeal engineer’ of an ever-more rationalised ICJ system.805 Centring
the ICC, the model sets a high premium on organisational loyalty. According to the ‘dedication’ competency, ‘[t]he foundation of the ICC competency model is dedication to the Court as a whole’.806 ‘The mission is what drives people to work for the ICC’ while ‘[a]ll ICC employees understand the mission and values and are committed to it’.807 When interacting outside the institution, the ideal professional ‘portrays and promotes a positive image of the
799 Competencies Model, 17. 800 Competencies Model, 17. 801 Competencies Model, 17. 802 Competencies Model, 17. 803 Competencies Model, 18. 804 Competencies Model, 18.
805 T. Skouteris, ‘The New Tribunalism: Strategies of (De)Legitimation in the Era of International Adjudication’
(2006) XVII Finnish Yearbook of International Law 307, 345, quoting Karl Popper.
806 Competencies Model, 15. 807 Competencies Model, 15.
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Court to the public’, ‘shows organisational commitment and loyalty’, and ‘speaks positively about the ICC’.808 They will ‘continuously build and maintain [the court’s] credibility’ among
external groups. This is not only a matter of upholding the court’s reputation, but of committing all staff to the ICC itself as the embodiment of ICJ.
Beyond instilling dedication, the competencies model ascribes value to professional tasks based on their specificity, calculability, and predictability. As observed in chapter 3, these knowledge criteria not only benefit the institution as the most capable mechanism for achieving justice, but further dilute that technocratic concept of justice by deprioritising activities which are non-specific, incalculable, and unpredictable. Activities such as reflecting on the ICC’s contribution to conflict situations, the values it espouses, and the blindspots it cements. Such activities would require a degree of creativity and good judgment, as well as an appreciation of the inevitably political nature of the ICC’s work. These traits, however, lie beyond what the current managerial frame allows. Managerial criteria, although designed to prevent ineffective and costly activities, also reproduce the existing and often deficient version of justice meted out by the ICC as a production line of tangible outputs, to the detriment of other non- technocratic versions of ICJ. The competencies model instructs professional staff in this managerial paradigm to reinforce the ICC’s hegemonic position.
In addition to producing the efficient professional via its substantive content, the competencies model also inscribes managerial identity aesthetically through its use of diagrams, tables, bullet-points, and an authoritative institutional voice. The first page of the model contains a diagram of the ICC’s seven competencies (see fig. 8). The competencies fit together in the shape of an arrow and thus represent the vehicle by which the professional and the institution as a whole travel towards the court’s aims. The arrow also doubles as a building- like structure, in which ‘dedication to the mission and values’ are the foundations and the ‘realising objectives’ represent the roof. Symbolically, the competencies become the institution, representing both the means by which the court will realise its aims and, as an arrow, the aim of the institution itself. Through the competencies model, then, the institution becomes the means and ends of professional activity.
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The competencies document has other subtle material qualities. The model is detailed in a series of tables. Boxed in through lines and fields, the professional identity is literally fixed into place. Bullet-points, which are used to list positive and negative behavioural indicators, catalogue managerial and non-managerial traits as incontrovertible fact. As Strathern has observed of bullet-points, ‘not only is there no narrative and no plot, there is no record of the process of compilation, no internal monitoring of discourse, no authorial self-scrutiny … no social observation, no science, and in that sense no facts’.809 Bullet-points are, in fact, ‘antimeaning … They appear to be text (form) but they are not to be analysed (content)’.810 At one level, boxes, lines and bullet-points may evince a clarity of professional purpose. But in decontextualizing the lawyer and removing any opportunity for contestation, these traits
809 M. Strathern, ‘Bullet-Proofing: A Tale from the United Kingdom’, A. Riles (eds), Documents: Artifacts of
Modern Knowledge (University of Michigan Press 2006) 181, 196.
810 Strathern, ‘Bullet-Proofing’, 198.
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establishing parameters of good and bad behaviour become the only basis on which to assess the lawyer, rather than the broader work of the court, its values, and global impact.811
Finally, these material features are bolstered by an authoritative and depersonalised institutional voice. The competencies model posits these random collection of behaviours as indisputable and official facts about the staff member. The model plays on its own ‘semantic vacuousness’ through phrases like client need, innovation, and clear vision to regulate the ideal professional without ever fleshing out what these terms mean.812
The institutional voice also combines elements of distance and proximity, universality and particularity, to sustain institutional hegemony. The competencies model is founded on a passive and depersonalised tone. By asserting that the optimal employee ‘acts’, ‘clarifies’, and ‘seeks’ while the sub-optimal employee ‘fails’ and ‘does not act’, the model’s indicative mood expresses personal opinion as institutional fact. Such grammatical moves also create distance between the institution and its staff to reify the former.813 The institutional voice seeks to embody a collective, universal truth while simultaneously representing individual behaviours as personal, particularised deficiencies. In doing so, the model purges institutional or structural responsibility for the court’s problems and places such responsibility on individual staff. To that individualised problem, the institution posits individualised solutions: when ‘others do not deliver what was agreed upon’, the lawyer ‘responds promptly’;814 when situations change, they ‘make[] sure that alternatives are available’; in any given moment, the lawyer ‘make[s] positive use of the opportunities it presents’.815 Individualising responsibility and fixing
professional identity binds the fate of the ICJ project to the optimisation of its experts.