Читать книгу An Introduction to Evaluation - Chris Fox - Страница 36

However, in the post-war period the dominance of the scientific approach to evaluation most clearly expressed in experimental evaluation designs was challenged on a number of fronts. In some branches of the social sciences the positivist paradigm that the scientific approach rests upon was questioned (we discuss this in more detail in Chapter 12) and throughout the 1970s and 80s evaluation theory saw the increasing influence of more pluralistic and naturalistic approaches to evaluation ( Lincoln and Guba 1986). In the US, the Reagan administration of 1980 signalled the start of attempts to curtail domestic federal expenditure (Rossi et al. 2004), and in the UK Thatcher’s government of 1979 introduced a new approach to public sector accountability that since has become known as ‘the new public management’ or ‘managerialism’ (Palfrey et al. 2012), a trend that continued through successive governments including the Blair administration of 1997 (6 and Peck 2004), the Brown administration and the Conservative government under the stewardship of David Cameron. This new emphasis on accountability and ‘value for money’, or what Vedung refers to as the ‘neo-liberal wave’, has, if anything, strengthened the position of evaluation, although at the same time it has changed it:

In the neo-liberal wave, it is regarded as imperative that the fundamental principal in a representative democracy, the demos, has a right to know how her agents spend her money. This results in an increased emphasis on the accountability of agents in terms of resource use, by checking for economy, effectiveness and cost efficiency. Evaluation has thus been strengthened and, above all, taken on new forms. Evaluation has become a permanent feature of results-based management and of outsourcing. Evaluation has taken on new expressions in the form of accountability assessments, performance measurement and consumer satisfaction appraisal. Quality assurance and benchmarking are also recommended. (Vedung 2010: 273)