The art and science of non-evaluation evaluation

Jones, Linda

doi:10.1177/1355819618779614

Cited by 18 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…This study illuminates the difficulty of straightforwardly evaluating policy and practice in the contentious area of public involvement within health care change (for more on the limits of evaluation see Marsh and McConnell, 2010;Jones, 2018). The perceived purposes of public involvement in major service change vary not merely between campaigners and decision-makers, but between different publics and at different levels of the health system.…”

Section: Discussion: Carrots Sticks and Sermonsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Transforming health care: the policy and politics of service reconfiguration in the UK's four health systems

Stewart

Greer

Ercia

et al. 2019

HEPL

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Public involvement in service change has been identified as a key facilitator of health care transformation (Foley et al., 2017) but little is known about how health policy influences whether and how organisations involve the public in change processes. This qualitative study compares policy and practice for involving the public in major service changes across the UK's four health systems (England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland). We analysed policy documents, and conducted interviews with officials, stakeholders, NHS staff and public campaigners (total number of interviewees = 47). Involving the public in major service change was acknowledged as a policy challenge in all four systems. Despite ostensible similarities, there were some clear differences between the four health systems' processes for involving patients and the public in major changes to health services. The extent of central Government oversight, the prescriptiveness of Government guidance, the role for intermediary bodies and arrangements for independent scrutiny of contentious decisions all vary. We analyse how health policy in the four systems has used ‘sticks’ and ‘sermons’ to promote particular approaches, and conclude that both policy and the wider system context within which health care organisations try to effect change are significant, and understudied aspect of contemporary practice.

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Section: Discussion: Carrots Sticks and Sermonsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Transforming health care: the policy and politics of service reconfiguration in the UK's four health systems

Stewart

Greer

Ercia

et al. 2019

HEPL

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“…Evaluating the three approaches in terms of ‘what works’ for the adoption and implementation of change 26 is difficult due to the local specificity of health services and conflicts as well as the normative and often conflicting assumptions that drive much of the literature. Our argument does have immediate implications for the large literatures on change management and public participation.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing health care with, for, or against the public: an empirical investigation into the place of the public in health service reconfiguration

Greer

Stewart

Ercia

et al. 2020

J Health Serv Res Policy

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Objectives This study sought to understand the different approaches taken to involving the public in service reconfiguration in the four United Kingdom health systems. Methods This was a multi-method study involving policy document analysis and qualitative semi-structured interviews in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Results Despite the diversity of local situations, interview participants tended to use three frames within which they understood the politics of service reconfigurations: an adversarial approach which assumed conflict over scarce resources (change against the public); a communications approach which defined the problem as educating the public on the desirability of change (change for the public); and a collaborative approach which attempted to integrate the public early into discussions about the shape and nature of desirable services (change with the public). These three framings involved different levels of managerial time, energy, and resources and called on different skill sets, most notably marketing and communications for the communications approach and community engagement for the collaborative approach. Conclusions We argue that these framings of public involvement co-exist within organisations. Health system leaders, in framing service reconfiguration as adversarial, communicative or collaborative, are deciding between conceptions of the relationship between health care organisations and their publics in ways that shape the nature of the debates that follow. Understanding the reasons why organisations adopt these frames would be a fruitful way to advance both theory and practice.

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“…Simultaneously, the political context of evaluation and legitimation requires programs to maintain coherence and a unified image. Navigating this tension becomes more complicated when taking into account that program committees do not act as impersonal "cogs in the wheels" of a bureaucratic New Public Management machinery but instead need to manage shifting network coalitions (Jones 2018), program goals changing over time (Broer, Bal, and Pickersgill 2017), and divergent program interpretations of various stakeholders with diverging political interests (Broer, Bal, and Pickersgill 2017;Bailey et al 2017;Shove 2003). Maintaining the coherence of an overall program while avoiding fragmentation and disintegration of the program's overall goals is therefore a substantive, ongoing task.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On Staging Work: How Research Funding Bodies Create Adaptive Coherence in Times of Projectification

Wehrens

Oldenhof

Bal

2021

Science, Technology, & Human Values

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While recent science and technology studies literature focuses on “projectification” and its felt tensions for researchers, a surprising scarcity of empirical work addresses experiences at the “other end,” such as funding bodies often held “responsible” for tensions encountered by researchers. Actors in funding bodies experience similar tensions, however. While projectification necessitates predictability and individual project objectives, research funding is also increasingly organized in networks promoting local experimentation. Moreover, funding bodies are part of a system of accountability in which investments are legitimized politically in often reductionist ways. We argue for the salience of more detailed empirical investigations into the work of funding bodies as they navigate these tensions. We apply a dramaturgical perspective to investigate the “staging work” of program committees responsible for the management of funded programs, identifying three forms of staging work: setting the scene, temporal narration, and signifying success. All come with discursive, material, and symbolic dimensions. We develop the notion “adaptive coherence” to show how the program committee sought to maintain the coherence of the overall program despite continuous risks of fragmentation due to projectification, local experimentation, and divergence in interests. “Adaptive coherence” proves productive in incorporating the temporal and spatial dimensions of staging work in networked contexts.

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The art and science of non-evaluation evaluation

Cited by 18 publications

References 30 publications

Transforming health care: the policy and politics of service reconfiguration in the UK's four health systems

Transforming health care: the policy and politics of service reconfiguration in the UK's four health systems

Changing health care with, for, or against the public: an empirical investigation into the place of the public in health service reconfiguration

On Staging Work: How Research Funding Bodies Create Adaptive Coherence in Times of Projectification

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