Multiplicity, discretion, and power: enacting school report cards under performance management

Americo B.L.; Clegg S. · Culture and Organization (2026) · DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2026.2699194

Resumen

School report cards are key audit devices through which New Public Management is enacted in public schools. We examine how educational professionals enact school report cards. We draw on Mol's concepts of coordination, distribution, and inclusion as abductive sensitizing devices. Based on ethnographic research in a Brazilian state school, we show how school report cards are enacted as audit instruments and sites of professional agency and organizational multiplicity. New public administration emerges as far less monolithic an imposition than it might seem at first sight; professional discretion is not eliminated but reconfigured, enabling professionals to adapt audit devices to local realities. The study contributes to organizational studies by extending Mol's enactment theory to public sector governance, empirically demonstrating how discretion operates through local adaptations of audit tools; conceptually, it advances a situated understanding of regulation beyond the binary of control and resistance.

Instituciones: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú