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Next, McKenzie sees the term “performance management” (p. 55) as being used in relation to questions and standards of efficiency as they apply to economics. Organizational theory looks at the efficiency of individuals and organizations within a capitalist society that is concerned with “the bottom line: maximizing outputs and minimizing inputs” (p. 81). This economic model of performance and efficiency has recently come to carry more and more influence in the field of education. Students sit standardized tests that measure their academic performance. Teachers and schools, in their turn, are judged and rated according to the relative success or failure of these performances. Young people are taught that they are preparing themselves to enter an adult world, where, as McKenzie’s (2001) title dictates, they must “Perform or Else.” As such, and as mentioned earlier, my study forms what might be called a “counterperformance in curriculum” (see Blackadder, 2003 and later in this work) in which students prepare themselves for the future through their interactive encounters with artists and culture, and through which they may develop a critical aesthetic philosophy that is more concerned with changing the world than it is with becoming more efficient within the status quo.
The third field McKenzie (2001) surveys is that of technology, where he sees the primary challenge of performance being that of effectiveness. After listing over 70 products and companies that include the word performance in their title (McKenzie, pp. 104–106), McKenzie states that “[t]his use of ‘performance’ to market everything from carpets and computers to mops and manifolds indicates one thing: for specialists and nonspecialists alike, technologies perform [italics original]” (p. 106). “Technological performance, as engineered and evaluated by Techno-Performance researchers, refers to the behaviors and properties that technologies exhibit while executing specific tasks in specific contexts” (p. 130). Computers, missiles, and cars are all subjected to trials that measure their respective performances. Billions of dollars, for example, have been invested since the early 1990s in the development of “high performance technologies” and networks: super-fast and super-smart ways to successfully compete in a global market (pp. 98ff.).