Efficiency is commonly described in disparaging terms as bean-counting, nit-picking, micro-management. My early studies in educational administration were highly critical of planning and the quest for efficiency, epitomised in the notion of the ‘efficiency expert’ who, clipboard in hand, conducted time and motion studies on unwary employees and made recommendations that invariably screwed workers more tightly to alienating work. More recently, government rhetoric has equated inefficiency with a need to save money; as Chapter 3 explored, alleged inefficiency in the civil service has been semantically glued to questions of ‘bloat’ and necessary redundancies.

However, efficiency does not necessarily mean cost-cutting. Scientists understand efficiency as the ratio of input to output. Efficiency is often explained by reference to machines. A machine is not a source of energy, and does not store energy, so machine efficiency refers to the amount of energy dissipated through its operation. A machine runs at maximum efficiency when its output of energy is only slightly less than the input. Of course, it is exactly this kind of definition that critical management scholars have argued is not applicable to organisations. Running a hospital, for instance, ought not, they suggest, be subject to simple input–output measures, as neither input (sick patients) nor output (well patients) are measurable in the way that energy is. But the notion of efficiency as minimal waste reduction is, this chapter suggests, still useful.

In public policy, the notion of efficiency is almost always sutured to that of effectiveness. Effectiveness (addressed in Chapters 6 and 7) is taken to be the achievement of designated outputs and outcomes. Effectivenessmeasures how well the desired outcomes are achieved, while efficiency addresses the process.