Public Work Abroad

Professionalization, Ethics, and Fidelity to an Evaluation Ethos

“…My personal view is that the professional ethos of evaluation ought to be grounded in a rationale for citizens as required actors in evaluation. Support for that way of thinking can be found in the literature on democratic (or civic) professionalism (e.g., Dzur, 2008; Sullivan, 2004) as well as in the literature on civic agency and public work (e.g., Boyte, 2007, 2014; Ostrom, 1999, 2010). Martin Reynolds and I are in the process of explicating a justification for evaluation as public work that combines insights from these literatures with ideas from critical system heuristics and the literature on knowledge utilization.…”

“…As Kreber (2016) explains, the function of professionals in society in this perspective is:To provide opportunities or spaces for the public to debate issues of concern, explore solutions, and make decisions together…professional expertise is there to inform and help the public understand the issues more deeply…and appreciate why making decisions about these issues is often complex, and perhaps also why certain decisions that were made in the past did not have desired consequences. (p. 113)An evaluation ethos grounded in ideas of democratic professionalism and civic agency regards the production of evaluation knowledge as a “relational public craft,” as Boyte (2007, p. 83) describes it, rather than as a detached, objective, expert undertaking commonly promoted by many evaluators. Furthermore, neither the model of the professional as educator nor the professional as advocate defines the political role of the evaluator in this perspective.…”