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This article is inspired by the current attention paid to bibliometric methods in evaluating research relevance and impact. The logic behind the trend is examined by comparing highly and less cited publications in the same knowledge field (i.e. performance measurement) to see if and how they are different, especially in terms of research design and methods used. Findings indicate that various research designs and methods are equally represented among highly and less highly cited works, and that the only feature that does seem to play a role is if the cited author is an internationally renowned scholar. Findings also indicate an indiscriminate use of citation where the quality and relevance of secondary data are taken for granted. A vague hint of something, found in a single case study or inferred from a purely theoretical work, may thus over time and with more citations added become universal fact or even 'evidence'.

The increasing role of the non-profit sector in publicly funded programmes over the last two decades is not only a new way for governments to finance social policy and cut expenditure; there are idealistic reasons as well. Above all, non-profit organizations are believed to possess a string of democratic values. The problem though is that the extended role subjects non-profit organizations to accountability requirements such as the use of performance measures. Severe doubts have been expressed about the theory and practice of such measures, especially in contexts where the applied system of measures and the programme to be measured diverge in terms of inherent value systems. Although the critique has been reiterated many times in the evaluation literature, no one has yet come up with empirical evidence that demonstrates the consequences of applying performance measures in particular contexts. By testing some of the most common pitfalls with the help of a programme-theory approach, this article contributes to the filling of that gap.

SummaryThis article explores how three evaluation systems in eldercare governance, two national and one local, operate and interact at the municipal, administrative, and service levels in a Swedish municipality. The case study focuses on the three systems' contributions to accountability and to improving eldercare quality. It is based on multiple sources, including 28 interviews with local key actors involved in local eldercare governance, and the results derive from a directed content analysis guided by four research questions.FindingsThe study demonstrates that the three evaluation systems support accountability and quality improvement in different ways and have different consequences for local actors. The systems create multiple accountability problems and have multiple constitutive effects, for example, creating different notions of what quality in eldercare means. The systems' contributions to improving eldercare quality differed: the net effect of the two national systems was negative, whereas the local system has helped improve eldercare quality without any identified negative effects so far.ApplicationsThe article broadens our theoretical understanding and knowledge of regulatory mechanisms in eldercare governance. It has significance for eldercare policy by finding that policymakers and service providers must be aware of and manage multiple evaluation systems and accountability problems. Its implication for eldercare practice is that local actors must build evaluation capacity to manage existing evaluation systems in order to improve their own practices.

This paper explores the use, functions and constitutive effects of evaluation systems in local school governance, and identifies how contextual factors affect various uses of evaluation in this context. This case study of three Swedish municipalities demonstrates that local evaluation systems are set up to effectively sustain local school governance and ensure compliance with the Education Act and other state demands. Local decision makers have learned to navigate the web of evaluations and developed response strategies to manage external evaluations and to take into account what can be useful and what cannot be overlooked in order to avoid sanctions. The study shows that in contexts with high issue polarisation, such as schooling, the use of evaluation differs between the political majority and opposition, and relates to how schools perform in national comparisons and school inspections. Responses to external evaluations follow the same pattern. Some key performance indicators from the National Agency of Education and the School Inspectorate affect local school governance in that they define what is important in education, and reinforce the norm that benchmarking is natural and worthwhile, indicating constitutive effects of national evaluation systems. ; Konsekvenser av utvärderingar för grundskolans praktik

Evaluation systems of various types are an integral part of a country's education policy space, within which they are supposed to have the basic functions of enhancing accountability and supporting school development. Here we argue that in a crowded policy space evaluation systems may interfere with each other in a way that can have unintended consequences and create new 'policies by the way' that are not the result of intentional policy decisions. To shed light on this argument, we examine five of approximately 30 evaluation systems operating in the Swedish education system. Our analysis examines a situation in which many evaluation systems are doing almost the same thing, i.e. collecting a similar and limited set of quantitative data, and addressing the same local governance actors with the primary goal of supporting school development in the same direction. By doing so, these evaluation systems could thus give rise to several unintended consequences, including a scaling down of the school law and curriculum, multiple accountability problems, increased administration and new intermediary job functions at the level of local education governance. ; Konsekvenser av utvärdering för grundskolans praktik

Education has always been a reform-intensive policy sector, perhaps more so now than ever before. In studying education reforms, analysis has typically emphasised elements and/or the entire policy process of individual reforms. The same is essentially true for the management of education reforms, which tends to treat an individual reform as a cycle in which every element is subject to organisational management practices. In contrast to approaching education policies as stand-alone phenomena, we argue that policies exist in context: they are occupants of a "policy space". In this paper, we draw on a contemporary Swedish teacher certification (STC) reform to explore what happens when a reform is implemented in a policy space that can potentially be portrayed as crowded, or even overcrowded. The main results indicate that while diverse local implementation strategies have been employed, STC has ended up in an overcrowded educational policy space. In this space, new and former reforms jostle against each other, giving rise to various un- foreseen problems that are difficult or even impossible to solve locally. Based on these observations, we identify several different interactions and unintended consequences or "policies by the way", thereby adding components useful in refining the theory of policy space.