The Rhetoric of Management Control in Italian Cities

Abstract

This article deals with Italian administrative change. The introduction of management control and evaluation systems in Italian local governments is the best example of the managerial rhetoric of administrative change in Italy. Actually, it brings new meanings of public action and suggests new identities taken from the private sphere. The authors point out some critical aspects of this local governments reform in the frame of the neo-liberal ideology. Particularly, the reductive codification of the concept of effectiveness, which the reform laws describe as a verification of organizational output, supports an auto-referential system of control and evaluation.