The Duck-Rabbit Ambiguity of Evaluations: A Comparative Study of How Evaluative Ideals Are Discursively Constructed and Affect Evaluative Judgments

Abstract: Evaluative practices play an increasingly important role in the management of local government. More than ever, evaluations are seen as a means for stakeholders to garner objective information about the performance of public organizations in order to demand accountability. However, this understanding of evaluative judgments as objective is being challenged by constructivist scholars. They argue that evaluations are performative, meaning creating activities whose results hinge on normative and prescriptive understandings of what evaluations should focus on and what an ideal organization should look like. In Sweden, municipal audit boards represent one of the most important evaluative actors but have rarely been examined from a critical perspective. This paper investigates in what way evaluative ideals, through discourse practice, might affect evaluative judgments. A most similar systems case selection design is used to highlight the potential effect of evaluative ideals on evaluative judgments. Results show an overarching discursive theme of depoliticization as well as a dominance of rational ideals in the two municipal audit boards studied, with the audit board that made less critical evaluative judgments following the rational ideal slightly less in favor of a learning ideal.