Martin Williams, Associate Professor in Public Management, wrote a paper about how 'capacity' has become a term for describing bureaucratic performance, but it often obscures the complexity of bureaucratic action and focuses attention on hypothetical potential rather than actual performance. 

Published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, 'Beyond state capacity: bureaucratic performance, policy implementation and reform' discusses the limitations to conceiving of narrower questions of bureaucratic performance and policy implementation through the lens of the broad, aggregate concept of capacity.