Abstract
This study adopted a qualitative approach to address a range of questions intended to clarify and explain the ways in which performance management and measurement (PMM) has been used as part of the Kingdom of Thailand's public service reform. The study examines the origins of Thailand's public sector development within the context of wider debates about New Public Management, bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy, and the emergence of HRM. By adopting a qualitative approach, based on interviews with over 60 managers and employees, it provides a rare insight into the ways in which PMM is experienced by those who are required to implement it and who are subject to it. These insights are especially interesting as they also provide one of the few qualitative studies into Thai organisational practices. In order to evaluate how far the responses to PMM are specific to the public sector, a comparison is made with a private bank in order to control for some of the influence of national culture. The findings suggest that, despite a rhetoric of 'performance', the public sector organisations are finding it difficult to make PMM operate effectively. In particular, it is shown that there is a persistent bureaucratic culture that inclines employees to frame PMM in terms of compliance to hierarchical authority rather than identify with it as a means of improving real performance. This is seen to be associated with challenges to psychological contracts and the established patterns of trust, discretion and power. In contrast, the private sector organisation had managed to establish 'performance' as a substantive feature of its management processes, especially HRM, and had adopted forms of management that appeared closer, in some respects, to ideas of post-bureaucracy.