Quantifying Public Management in Bangladesh

Quantifying Public Management in Bangladesh raises the poverty of the number culture in Bangladesh management. When one can say that it takes x time for an agency to assist farmers, y time to process a customer application, z time to settle employee grievances or costs b taka to accelerate deliveries, it can be claimed that public personnel collect, process and disseminate necessary measures and indicators apply those to sectors and sub-sectors and help spread the resulting number locally, nationally, regionally and internationally. But this is not the case at present in Bangladesh and it is not changing anytime soon. Measurement and quantification have had a long tradition in management, but in Bangladesh, public management, driven by the generalist and routine ethos, has remained largely descriptive and unmeasured. Vague, shallow and superficial assertions instead of numerical specificity, prevail, while some elites are reduced to fond purring, trite apologies and banal platitudes. No real measurement no real management is true, and anxiety, fear and discomfort about quantification must be mitigated by management education, training, retooling and socialization.