Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 35

Rossi et al. (2004) note that the expansion of evaluation accompanied the (US) expansion of government, particularly at the federal level. They note that in the 1930s the Great Depression in the US saw rapid growth in ‘human services’ provided by government, and during that same period social scientists started to investigate the political, organisational and administrative decision making that took place in government. As government became increasingly complex and technical the importance of evaluation started to be acknowledged by politicians and administrators (ibid.). As described above, evaluation continued to expand rapidly during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the 1960s in response to large-scale social programmes such as the War on Poverty and the Great Society (ibid.). This was growth primarily in summative, goals-based evaluation – what Vedung (2010) describes as the ‘science-driven wave’:

From its inception in the late 1950s and consolidation in the mid-1960s, evaluation has been embedded into one of the great narratives of our time: that the world can be made more humane if capitalism and the market economy can be reined in by appropriate doses of central policy planning and public intervention at a comprehensive level ... In public-sector thinking, this was hailed as a victory of a kind of rationality. Public policy should be made more scientific and sensible. (Vedung 2010: 265)