Abstract:
This article1 is drawn from the work of Barry MacDonald and is written as a tribute to him. It addresses an issue he raised some while ago whose relevance intensifies today in a world seeing the demise of independent professional practice and public sector ethos. The ‘portrayal of persons’ relates to a paper MacDonald wrote in 1976 (MacDonald 1976), at a time when the discipline and the practice of evaluation was in rapid emergence and development. He was arguing forcefully that to understand innovation we have to understand innovators. This was not a new message. It had been enunciated elsewhere, including by Schwab (1978) and Schön (1971) whose work revealed individualism, values and exchange as key elements of innovation. But what MacDonald added was a political dimension: using the portrayal of persons to share control of the evaluation by passing responsibilities for interpretation (generalisation) to the evaluand; and by empowering the organisation by enhancing knowledge of itself (for example, against attempts to enforce external values on professional action through external accountability).