The rise and decline of a mandatory accountability measure

During the late 1980s and early 1990s the higher education sector in Australia underwent tumultuous amalgamations and restructuring to join the Unified National System of higher education. This required the adoption of new, or rediscovered, management tools. This paper focuses on one of these tools, performance indicators, and their adoption, and later decline, as a government mandated measure for improving reported accountability through publication in university annual reports. Drawing on institutional theory we argue that performance indicators were adopted as a symbolic gesture to satisfy the need for external legitimacy and university⿿s accountability. Also, as universities were coerced into adoption, the perceived necessity to report performance indicators in annual report was discontinued when this pressure was relaxed. This is supported by a decline of almost 50 percent in the reporting of performance indicators in university annual reports in the last 10 years.