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Session Submission Summary

E/valuative Actions: Exploring the Doings of E/valuation in Evaluative Systems 1

Sat, September 1, 9:00 to 10:30am, ICC, E3.10

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

New forms of evaluation are reconfiguring professional and organisational life in ways we are only beginning to understand. Not only has the number of evaluations multiplied; multiple evaluative agencies often co-exist. Recent sociological research has therefore emphasised the empirical importance of focusing on the dynamics that occur when activities in an organisation become subject to multiple (sometimes competing) e/valuation registers (Brandtner 2017; Pontikes 2012; Stark 2009). This research also suggests that the plurality of e/valuation registers to which an organisation is subject may actually strengthen the ‘resilience’ and ‘creative potential’ of that organisation. In this track, we wish to bring into awareness the multiplicity of e/valuation practices and how these influence organisational practices, including practices of knowledge production and healthcare.

Expanding STS insights in the enactment of e/valuation in contemporary society, this track attends to evaluative actions; exploring the ‘critical multidimensionality’ of how professional work is assessed and configured numerically, verbally and visually through the use of metrics – both by ‘outside’ actors and practitioners themselves. Metrics allow for experimenting; using performance measurement to enhance healthcare quality, or arranging a more sensitive and nuanced process of intellectual production assessment in which metrics are embedded in wider practices of valuation (de Rijcke et al. 2016, Bal 2017). Yet, e/valuation may also involve strategic ignorance (Pinto 2015, Gross & McGoey 2015); rendering certain aspects invisible, while strengthening others. We are interested in these evaluative actions, and seek to raise questions about their practices and consequences for public and professional life. Questions that may be raised: How to analyse the complex relationship between evaluative knowledges and practices? Which valuation practices and commitments (professional, ethical, material) are we ourselves entangled with in our own work? What ‘comfortable’ and less fitting subjectivities are interpellated in certain evaluative systems? Whose voice is or becomes legitimate?

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