The Logics of Performance Funding: Situated Tensions in Basic Education

Abstract

This article applies institutional logics to examine the implementation of a performance-funding programme for Danish public schools. The programme introduced a potential bonus aimed at incentivizing improved educational outcomes for academically low-performing students. We investigate the implementation of the programme through decoupling, compromising, and differentiation between an incumbent educational logic and the programme's intruding economic logic, drawing on a qualitative study of a Danish municipality's responses using semi-structured interviews with administrators, school managers, and teachers. The findings demonstrate how a programme is translated into organizational practice, where solving some tensions induces new ones. The article contributes by highlighting different enactments of responses to tensions based on divergent interpretations of accounting technologies and institutional logics. It shows how an accounting technology goes through different translations from policy to influencing front-line personnel and how responses can involve compromising and manipulation as well as unsuccessful decoupling.