Målstyrning av daghemsverksamhet i Karlstad kommun : En undersökning om relationen mellan utvärderingsresultat och mål

Summery In the end of the 20th century it was no longer considered possible to manage the state and the municipal’s extensive activities in detail. Public organizations were faced with new problems, challenges and demands for change of administration. Management by objectives was to a very large extent seen as the solution to the problems of the future. Management by objectives is a type of management which explained shortly, imply that it is the overall objectives of the organization that are going to govern its activities by concretize them and making the continual evaluation of them the breeding ground for future decisions concerning the organization. In organizations managed by objectives it became common that the evaluations solely dealt with the objectives that appeared the easiest to measure, that is the quantitative objectives. The problem in public organizations is that the performances of the activities carried out there are hard to measure, because the objectives most often are of qualitative character. Among the public organizations that have claimed themselves to be managed by objectives there are therefore few which have had evaluation systems that in a distinct manner have measured the degree of object achievement. This essay was essentially written in the mid 1990’s and consists on the one hand of a theoretical exposition of the development of management by objectives, the most important elements along with a brief presentation of the criticism that have been directed against this method. On the other hand it consists of an empirical study within two day nurseries in the municipality of Karlstad. I chose to focus on municipal day nursery activity because I expected to mainly find creative objectives there. I chose to examine which methods was used within this sector in order to evaluate the outcome of the activities and how the outcome results were related to the political objectives set up by the same. In this survey a distinction appeared among the interviewees when it came to the knowledge of objectives at municipal level. It was also unclear whether the national objectives for the day nursery activities really had been concretized at this level. The method of managers and co-workers on different levels working together in order to formulate the objectives for the activities did not characterize the process. At the political and managerial level the interviewees assumed that the objectives set up politically constituted distinct frameworks for the activities. The objectives directing the work at result- and divisional level had been formulated from the needs the division staff felt the children to have, without connection to the politically set objectives for the activities. The methods for evaluation used on political and managerial level differed from the methods used on divisional level. The evaluation methods on different levels captured different parts of the activities and the methods used to evaluate the outcome of the activities was regarded as limited and did not manage to capture all aspects of the day nursery activities. The study results showed that there did not occur any co-ordination between the organization’s hierarchical levels when it came to evaluation methods or the taking care of the evaluation results. Neither was it obvious that the part of the outcome of the activities which was evaluated within the studied divisions was put in relation to the objectives of the activities on the corresponding level in the organization. The evaluation results from result- and divisional level did not seem to be brought up to politician- and management level and therefore could not be said to constitute future political decisions regarding the day nursery activities. It was hard to get an opinion about in what degree the activities actually were driven by the objectives and consequently what the function of the objectives were. Between the municipal level and result division the drawing up of objectives as well as the evaluation process was, as a whole carried out as isolated phenomena.