Strategic responses to Performance Measurement in Nonprofit ...

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to the mission or outcome perspective. In such a case a non-profit sector appropriate balanced
scorecard would be a matter of time.
Secondly, there is a mission drift. The social and non-profits organisations are operating as
professional service providers in a competitive field, where the private sector logic has
become dominant under New Public Management. Therefore the omission of a mission or
outcome perspective is a sign that non-profits are becoming more and more similar to their
private counterparts. Ashworth et al. call such a process (2000) convergence, i.e. that all
organizations in a field resemble each other more closely over time. New Public Management
encourages a market-oriented role model in order to purge the area from traditional non-profit
inefficiencies. That the private sector model plays a dominate role is in line with a finding by
Lakes (1999), who argued, on the basis of an empirical study, that social non-profit
organisations increasingly see their private competitors as a role model.
Another explanation can be argued by using institutional theory (e. g. Scott 1987, Zucker
1987, DiMaggio and Powell 1991) in a more classical sense. The majority of the non-profit
organisations interviewed use the balanced scorecard because it is regarded as a modern
management tool, helping to create legitimacy (Greiling 2010). The balanced scorecard
design is then an example of mimetic isomorphism (DiMaggio and Powell 1987) and is used
in a loosely-coupled or decoupled way (Scott and Meyer 1991, Lawton et al. 2000, Greiling
2010). With Scherm and Pietsch (2005) one can argue that the balanced scorecard may serve
a double function: Firstly, it helps to signal to the funders that the management of a non-profit
organisation is up-to-date with modern management tools. Secondly, it may also add to the
legitimacy of the key funders because they can communicate to their own key stakeholders
that they have supported organisations which subscribe to an efficient and effective
management practices. As a caveat it has to be mentioned that with a sample of only 20 non-
profit organisations it is not a clear-cut decision which explanations carry most weight.