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The concept of bureaucratization, originally at the heart of the work conducted by the sociologists of bureaucracy during the 1940s and 1950s, has been revisited since the 1980s to describe the effects produced by the various reforms that came out of the New Public Management movement, and in particular the phenomenon of performancebased management using objectives and indicators. This article demonstrates the heuristic nature of the analyses undertaken by early sociologists of administrations (Alvin Gouldner, Peter Blau, Michel Crozier), which focused on rules and how they were used, to outline the traits of the new “bureaucratic phenomenon” based on numbers, quantification and commensuration. This article also highlights the limits of this outlook, emphasizing the importance of considering the economic and especially political implications of mechanisms of performance-based management.