Evaluation as a free-standing discipline arose out of the ashes of World War II, a time of optimism, when government turned to the academy to guide public policy. The evaluation pioneers shared a bracing vision: a search for truth in the public interest. Seventy years later the glitter has faded, and disenchantment has taken hold. Evaluation, a quintessential public good, has become a market good, and eminent evaluation thinkers are asking the same questions about evaluation that they have been routinely asking of others—with sobering results. Yet, countervailing currents and turbulent streams lie just below the surface. Once a tipping point is reached, a new wave of evaluation diffusion will begin to curl. What might it look like?
BaumanZ (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
2.
CampbellDT (1971) Methods for the Experimenting Society. New York; Washington, DC: The Eastern Psychological Association and American Psychological Association.
3.
CarrollAJ (2011) Disenchantment, rationality, and the modernity of Max Weber. Forum Philosophicum16(1): 117–137.
4.
ChelimskyEShadishWR (eds) (1997) Evaluation for the 21st Century: A Handbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.
5.
CooperDLoweAPuxtyA, et al. (1988) Regulating the UK accountancy profession: Episodes in the relation between the profession and the state. In: The Economic and Social Research Council conference on corporatism, Policy Studies Institute, London, January, 1988.
6.
Dahler-LarsenP (2012) The Evaluation Society. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
FergusonA (1767) Essay on the History of Civil Society (ed. ForbesD). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 19.
9.
ForssK (2019) Getting value for money? A critical analysis of the costs and benefits of evaluation. In: FuruboJ-EStameN (eds) The Evaluation Enterprise. London; New York: Routledge, 189–90.
10.
FreidsonE (2001) Professionalism: The Third Logic. Cambridge: Polity Press.
11.
FreudS (2014 [1930]) Civilization and Its Discontents (Penguin Pocket Hardbacks). London: Penguin.
12.
FuruboJEStameN (eds) (2019) The Evaluation Enterprise. New York: Routledge.
13.
GrayJ (2019) Seven Types of Atheism. London: Allen Lane.
14.
HirschmanAO (1977) The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
15.
HirschmanAO (1981) Introductory Note in Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 288.
16.
HouseER (2005) The Many Forms of Democratic Evaluation (The Evaluation Exchange), vol. XI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Family Research Project.
17.
HouseER (2016) Inequality and conflict of interest in evaluation. In: DonaldsonSPicciottoR (eds) Evaluation for an Equitable Society. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 169–80.
18.
HumeDA (1739) Treatise of Human Nature. London: John Noone.
19.
LarsonMS (1977) The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. London: University of California Press.
20.
MaskinESenA (2014) The Arrow Impossibility Theorem. New York: Columbia University Press.
MilanovicB (2019) Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World. Cambridge, MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
23.
NatsiosA (2010) The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development (Essay). Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.
24.
NielsenSBLemireSChristieCA (2019) The commercial side of evaluation. In: FuruboJEStameN (eds) The Evaluation Enterprise. New York: Routledge, 243–65.
25.
ParkerM (2018) Shut Down the Business School: What’s Wrong With Management Education. London: Pluto Press.
26.
PattonM (2019) Blue Marble Evaluation: Premises and Principles. New York: The Guilford Press.
27.
PinkerS (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. London: Allen Lane.
28.
PowerM (1994) The Audit Explosion. London: DEMOS.
29.
RoslingHRoslingORoslingRA (2018) Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—And Why Things Are Better Than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books.
30.
SchwandtTA (2018) Acting together in determining value: A professional ethical responsibility of evaluators. Evaluation24(3): 306–317.
31.
SchwandtTA (2019) The concerted effort to professionalize evaluation practice: Whither are we bound? In: FuruboJEStameN (eds) The Evaluation Enterprise. New York: Routledge, 227.
32.
SchwandtTAGatesEF (2016) What can evaluation do? An agenda for evaluation in service of an equitable society. In: DonaldsonSPicciottoR (eds) Evaluation for an Equitable Society. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 67–81.
33.
ScrivenM (1991a) Beyond formative and summative evaluation. In: McLaughlinMWPhillipsDD (eds) Evaluation and Education: At Quarter Century. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 139.
34.
ScrivenM (1991b) Evaluation Thesaurus, 4th edn.Newbury Park, CA: SAGE.
ScrivenM (2016) The last frontier of evaluation: Ethics. In: DonaldsonSPicciottoR (eds) Evaluation for an Equitable Society. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 11–12.
