Reconstructing professional ethics and responsibility: Implications of critical systems thinking

Abstract

Historians and sociologists remind us that it is disingenuous to ignore the fact that despite differences in research practices as well as the degree of scientization and compartmentalization of the social sciences between the United States and Europe there have been continuous communications between Europeans and Americans over their meaning, purpose, and methods (Mancias, 1987; Wagner et al., 1991). A similar observation about the field of evaluation is warranted, not least since the advent of Evaluation founded in 1995 as ‘an international journal with strong European roots, but with a commitment to encourage dialogue between European, Scandinavian, Northern American, Asian, Australasian and other existing and emergent evaluation communities’ (Stern, 1995: 6). One issue of growing concern in the transnational evaluation conversation that Evaluation encourages, and one that has received a fair amount of attention from European contributors1 to Evaluation in the past 20 years, is the relevance of the scientific study of complex systems (i.e. complexity science) and systems approaches to managing complex issues (i.e. systems thinking) to the theory and practice of evaluation. Looking forward, I offer a few comments on one key idea in this conversation. Evaluation scholars and others have argued that value is not inherent in an intervention (object or activity) being evaluated, but rather is something ascribed to it by those involved in observing it (Stake and Schwandt, 2006; Wadsworth, 1997). Scholar-practitioners working in the tradition of critical systems thinking and specifically in critical systems heuristics (CSH) (e.g. Midgley, 2007; Reynolds, 2014; Ulrich and Reynolds, 2010; Williams, 2015) have expanded this insight by developing a particular approach to making value judgments called boundary critique. Following a brief sketch of this approach, I turn specifically to its implications for the current transnational conversation on the competencies, capabilities, and professional obligations demanded of evaluators. While judging value is presumably the very purpose of evaluation, evaluators have long struggled with multiple issues surrounding making judgments or appraisals of the value (merit, worth, significance) of an intervention (e.g. activity, policy, program, and so on). Debates have centered on how explicit an evaluator must be about the criteria employed for judgment – compare for example the fairly precise approach to identifying criteria and performance on those criteria as advocated by Scriven (1994) and Davidson (2005) to Stake’s (Stake et al., 1997) wholesale