Tracks toward a postmodern politics of evaluation

Abstract

We are facing a changing socio-political context today. As evaluators, we now recognize what Carol Weiss told us nearly two decades ago: that evaluation is through and through a political activity, carried out in political contexts. Furthermore, evaluation data compete with other information and claims, and for resources, in high-powered political contexts such as state and national legislatures. The evaluator who declines to learn how to present results to various publics, like the scholar who believes that her or his findings will be so persuasive on their own that they will influence policy processes, is doomed to find her or his hard-won “findings” shelved before the battle begins. But evaluators will find that increasingly, learning to negotiate in political contexts is hardly enough. Before the results of an evaluation effort ever get to the funding arena, other stakeholders will have had their chance to influence what is done and how it is accomplished. Recent public exchanges in the formal evaluation community (Fetterman, 1992; Lincoln, 1991; Lincoln & Guba, 1992, 1994; Sechrest, 1992; Sechrest, Babcock, & Smith, 1993) point to much more than a simple disagreement among evaluation models. In my AEA presidential address I tried to suggest that we ought to expand all of our models by incorporating not only more of the “sciences”, but more of the “arts”, in the broadest sense, the purpose of which was to make evaluation more flexible, and to make our practice of it more responsive to the very changing contexts and expanding stakeholders we sense in the real world of programs. One response to that paper (Sechrest, 1992) was an opinion that what I practiced wasn’t evaluation; it was hardly scientific, and certainly not detached enough to warrant its label as evaluation practice. I would like to suggest that when the broader socio-political context is assessed accurately, the past 25 years of social science and its most compelling debates point to a new political world. While my own work has paralleled contemporary