Critical Theory Evaluation

Critical theory evaluation is an activity concerned with the unveiling of false culture and determination of the merit, worth, or value of something, or the product of that process. Critical theory evaluation aspires to push praxis into motion through the conduct of inquiry. In positioning evaluation stakeholders as reflective and dialogic agents in discerning what is needed, what is good, and why this is so, critical theory evaluation seeks to change the way things are by challenging the way we make sense of things.

Building from the philosophies of critical social science, critical theory evaluation is conducted from a standpoint of questioning how we live our lives in the midst of false constructions about our social, political, and economic circumstances. The evaluation is influenced by an explicit value position that we operate beneath layers of false consciousness contributing to our own and others' exploitation and oppression. False ways of knowing and understanding have been shaped through unrecognized patterns of dominant discourses. As a response, critical theory evaluation seeks to engage evaluation participants in a dialectic process of questioning the history of their ideas and thinking about how privileged narratives of the past and present will influence future value judgments.

Recognizing how power presents itself and the situated position of power during an evaluation is a central characteristic of critical theory evaluation. The critical theory evaluator experiences the context of an evaluation as an arena of competing hegemonic interests. An economy of power is presumed to be inherent to the production of knowledge: People who have power over others have the resources to create the kind of information they need to maintain their privileged position. The fashioning of evaluative information can serve to reinforce the imbalanced status quo or ameliorate disparities in power distributions.

The power of whose ideas are represented through-out the evaluation is a value-laden activity mediated through critical theory evaluation. Evaluations conducted from feminist, deliberative democratic, or emancipatory perspectives reflect varying modes of critical theory evaluation. The amelioration of oppressive circumstances derives from the ability to regain new positions in and belief systems about power relationships. Therefore, the politics of weighting values and opinions (including the evaluator's) during a critical theory evaluation is not viewed as a liability but a responsibility.

The critical theory evaluator recognizes how power is structured through narrative and often cloaked by the language surrounding an evaluand. The organization is regarded as a socially constructed entity acting through a hierarchy of narratives, as Donald Campbell put it. To unmask the historical constructedness of dominant narratives, the evaluation processes attend to the politics of narrative within the organization and the influences of larger social, political, and economic factors [Page 93]that shape a master narrative. Evaluators make explicit their value position from the point of entry and work with evaluation participants to raise consciousness about how narratives shape the “house paradigm.”

The primary roles of the critical theory evaluator are that of educator and change agent. The evaluator views the organization as a collection of learners who may or may not be aware of the oppression in their lives but are intelligent and capable of coming to new understandings. As an educator, the evaluator adopts a Frierian problem-posing stance toward education. Working through the dialogue of the evaluation, learners are positioned to question the genesis of past knowledge and its influence on present ways of being. The current state of affairs is open to transformation through a process of critical reflection. This requires creating opportunities for genuine discourse free of systematic distortion and building commitments toward collective action.

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