OGGETTI SMARRITI E RITROVATI. CARTOGRAFARE I VALORI POLITICO-MORALI PER COMPRENDERE L’ONDATA DELLA VALUTAZIONE / Lost and Found, and Lost Again? Tracing Moral-Political Values in Understandings of the Evaluation Wave

Abstract

How do we understand the socio-historically unprecedented wave of evaluation which characterizes contemporary society? The article discusses five mental models that offer typical perspectives on evaluation. It is shown that each of them are also moral-political stances. The article discusses whether these stances too obviously reflect positions or “character masks” which characterize typical functional roles in relation to evaluation systems, thereby merely reproducing stories which already circulate in the evaluation society. The article discusses what would be required for a perspective on evaluation which takes evaluation seriously at the same time as the institutional and normative underpinnings under evaluation are kept open for democratic scrutiny.

Keywords:
Evaluation, Evaluation wave, Mental models of evaluation