Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 15

Monitoring, performance indicators (PIs) and broader performance management process have proliferated across the public, private and, increasingly, the not-for-profit sectors in the last few decades. We can link this proliferation to the development of ‘New Public Management’. Often associated with reforms to the public sector that were introduced during the administrations of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK and President Ronald Reagan in the US, New Public Management (NPM) involved structural changes to the public sector and the introduction of business methods into government (Hill and Hupe 2014), as well as practices such as shrinking the size of the state so that government reduced its service delivery capacity, contracting out government services to the private and not-for-profit sectors, a greater emphasis on the choice available to service users, and the creation of new public–private vehicles to deliver services (Hill and Hupe 2014). The adoption of business practices, a greater focus on managing by outputs and the increased ‘marketisation’ associated with NPM contributed to the proliferation of performance management measures.

Palfrey et al. (2012: 19, citing Carter et al. 1992) suggest that PIs are very useful as ‘tin openers’ because they help us clarify questions about performance. In this sense, they are a valuable starting point for evaluation, but are not a substitute for evaluation that incorporates the use of research methods (Palfrey et al. 2012).

Audit has also proliferated in the UK and US. Power (1997) charts a move from traditional audits that focus on financial probity to audits that ask broader questions about organisational performance and ‘Value for Money’ (VFM) (Palfrey et al. 2012). However, deciding on what matters in VFM involves value judgements (ibid.) and by imposing values audits can have unintended and dysfunctional consequences for the audited organisation. Evaluation does not avoid such value judgements but social scientists recognise their importance and have developed a number of strategies to avoid or incorporate them, depending upon the social science tradition they come from.

Accreditation has been used widely in the UK public sector as a strategy for setting standards for the performance of organisations and often starts with self-evaluation (Palfrey et al. 2012). Well-known examples in the UK include the use of ‘Trust’ status in sectors such as health and ‘Investors in People’ – a government agency that accredits organisations that demonstrate good practice in workforce management (ibid.).

If the ‘research’ component is what distinguishes evaluation from practices such as PIs, audits and accreditation, what is it then that differentiates ‘evaluation’ from ‘research’?