Suchergebnisse

Today many disciplines including organization and management, public administration, social psychology, educational research and political science are becoming interested in dialogue. Evaluators are only just beginning to recognize how valuable dialogue can be for their work. Dialogue may have the potential to improve the democratic quality of decision making and judgement in postmodern societies and enhance (mutual) understanding between people. In this special issue we aim to disentangle some of the complexities, meanings and aims of dialogue and dialogical evaluation. A number of evaluation scholars and practitioners will discuss different notions of the concept and its relevance for evaluation practice. They will also deal with some practical considerations: what are the essential characteristics of evaluation dialogue; who should participate and what should the role and responsibility of evaluators be. We will also identify areas where we think caution should be exercised. Examples of dialogical evaluation projects in various policy settings and countries – including Sweden, Holland and the USA – together with comments by other scholars are meant to stimulate an exchange of ideas.

Dialogue is crucial to evaluation. Through dialogue, people are invited to develop new, shared ways of seeing and acting. From a hermeneutic perspective, dialogue implies consensus, based upon shared meanings and oriented towards reaching agreement. Dialogue also implies disagreement, in the form of a conflict between different, rival stories. The role of the evaluator is to enter into dialogue with people participating in practice. It is also to stimulate a dialogue between participants. This requires support for marginalized voices, but also attention to the voices of those who are in power. Only if the evaluator tries to understand the values endorsed in a practice and is prepared to listen to the stories of all parties involved, can evaluation become a practice to which all participants contribute.

Dialogue is today commonplace in evaluation discourse. It represents an ambition to involve different stakeholders in an open and power-free exchange of opinions and ideas about what is being evaluated. The aim of this article is to discuss how to manage dialogue in practice. An evaluation case is used to illustrate how the evaluator manages a dialogue in different phases of the evaluation process. In order to handle the, sometimes, difficult situation resulting from many different views on the subject, the evaluator developed various methods, some new and innovative, to make the exchange of ideas possible. The article argues that dialogue in evaluation needs to be adjustable to different situations and the needs of the participants.

This article outlines a reflexive, dialogical approach to evaluation in which lived experiences, meanings and underlying values become the subject of reflexive dialogues among as many interested people as possible in order to heighten their understanding. Dialogue is considered as an open, divergent conversation. In contrast to a persuasive dialogue, this type of dialogue builds on reflection, the willingness to pause in a conversation, to spend time and to explore more deeply what seems to be essential to the participants themselves. Narrative (versus argumentative) rationality informs this kind of dialogue. A case example illustrates the approach. It concerns a formative evaluation of an injury-prevention programme in two performing-arts schools. The case shows how art students in particular experience the pressures of performance. Getting students, teachers and (para) medical experts to engage in reading stories of each other's experience also raises issues pertinent not only to their personal and mutual understanding but also to the culture of the institution.