Management by results and facets of information: focus on the Pact for Life of Pernambuco State, Brazil

Abstract

The new public management (NPM) was adopted by many countries in response to the inefficiency of the public sector and economic inertia in the 1970s. The state government of Pernambuco, Brazil, adopted the NPM ideas as a broader scope of public management. This management model has several strategic objectives and their performance indicators to measure the results. The government has been using information as a strategic element and it permeates all functions of management, policy and planning. This study chose the Pacto pela Vida – PPV (Pact for Life), which is the public security policy. As object of analysis, it offers through the information management practices, based on Braman’s information policy, the theoretical and methodological examples needed to provide evidence, as informational practices reveal the use of power. It concludes that information policy demonstrated informational and symbolic powers of the actors who have been processing and gathering information in the PPV.