02 November 2009

Evaluation in the Contemporary Organization

From the (emerging) thesis draft (I expect these excerpts will be posted in a chapter in early December-ish):
With respect to evaluation in a UCaPP environment, the organization itself must be considered to be a distinct actant in relation with the individual and thus is, as well, a subject of evaluation along with the individual. It cannot be take as axiomatic that the organization is always correct in its often arbitrary selection of goals and objectives, and thus, individual goals and objectives derived via functional decomposition may well be contestable; indeed, in a UCaPP organization, they must be contested and negotiated. The fundamental evaluative concern of the UCaPP organization thus changes from that of the typical BAH organization, asking a different question: In what ways did the individual contribute to enabling and creating the organization's intended effects, and how well did the organization respond?


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2 comments:

Joanna Fletcher said...

Wondering about your thoughts on how this idea could play out in education. It seems the power should be reversed - in what ways did the organization contribute to the individual's intended effects, and how well did the individual respond? Does this make sense to you?!
Joanna

Mark Federman said...

In a sense, it makes sense: if we are evaluating the "product" (sorry) of the education system, the framing you suggest does work. In that respect, evaluating a student year-by-year makes little sense - it's only when we see how that person functions in life do we understand the effect-iveness of the education system. (After all, education is what remains after you've forgotten everything you've been taught.)

However, in the sense of my thesis, I would be looking at evaluating, say, teachers and principles [sic], through their contributions to the effects of the educational organization. Those effects are manifest through the effects enacted by the students throughout their lives.