Murray Saunders

This article presents the results of a retrospective case study that critically examined the use of evaluation within a continuing professional development programme for healthcare professionals (SEARCH). The study explored the extent to which a developmental evaluation approach was taken within SEARCH. The results demonstrate that SEARCH was a complex, innovative and evolving programme functioning in a complex and changing healthcare system. Evaluation processes used within SEARCH were developmental in nature and informed substantive programme changes. The extent of the changes went beyond what would be expected following standard formative or summative evaluation and fit with the concepts and use of developmental evaluation as articulated by Patton. This study demonstrates that even though staff and faculty did not call their assessments developmental evaluation, this is in fact what they were doing and the results informed future SEARCH development and evaluation.

The non‐binding nature of the Bologna Declaration and loose policy‐making and implementation through the open method of coordination (OMC) have led to varied national responses to the Bologna Process. The OMC has allowed countries room for manoeuvre to interpret Bologna policy and attach different degrees of importance to it. Looking at the interplay between agency and structure in policy implementation, this article aims to illustrate the localised character of Bologna policy implementation driven by national priorities and political agendas, a reflection of the ‘policy as text’ metaphor (Ball, 1994).The analysis is driven by an agentic understanding of the policy process, highlighting ‘actors’ perceptions, perspectives, preferences, actions and interactions' (Trowler, 2002). Three different country reactions are examined — England, Portugal and Denmark, described as selective acquiescence, creative commitment and strategic conformity to capture the essence of the cases in question. In analysing the countries' responses, the article considers national readings of Bologna, motivations behind responses to the Process, as well as its reception and implementation at national level.

This paper analyses how middle managers perform and experience their role in enacting policy in Scottish higher education institutions. The policy focus is the quality enhancement framework (QEF) for learning and teaching in higher education, which was launched in 2003. The data-set was collected between 2008 and 2010, during the evaluation of the QEF by means of focus groups with middle managers at nine Scottish institutions. The metaphor of a policy implementation staircase helps to situate middle managers’ position in enactment, and analyse their experience of the role. Despite the values of collegiality and ownership upheld by the QEF, middle managers’ accounts of their practices reveal that their position at the interface between university management and core academic activities continues to be a delicate one, marked by contradictory allegiances to institutional strategies and the concerns of academic colleagues. While emphasising middle managers’ pivotal role in the implementation of the QEF policy, the data paradoxically suggest that the systemic positioning of middle managers is more influential in shaping their role of mediation than the values of collegiality and ownership promoted by this enhancement approach to quality specific to Scotland.

This article contributes to the discussion of evaluation use. It argues for a social practice approach to the analysis of evaluation use that enables a discerning and fine-grained understanding of how evaluations might be used by real people in real time. It suggests a distinction between two dimensions of the way an evaluation might be used. It offers an interpretation of ‘use’, which focuses on the context and the capacity of the organizational setting in which evaluation outputs are used; and ‘usability’, which emphasizes the extent to which the evaluation design itself militates against or encourages the use of its outputs in the broadest sense. The two dimensions are distinct yet closely interrelated. The article concludes with a consideration of various approaches and tools that highlight the dimensions of use and usability from a social practice perspective.

This study explores responses to rankings from a group of staff working as education partnership facilitators for a professional intermediary organisation, the British Council. The study adopts an activity systems perspective from which to view the contexts in which rankings are encountered and the range of practices used to reduce tensions created by rankings, or reconcile their effects. The article illustrates how rankings have become embedded as a new form of infrastructure in the international education “context of practice”; as a tool (to enable benchmarking); as a form of exchange (to demonstrate credentials to customers and stakeholders); and as a division of labour (in the task of assessing value across national borders). The range of responses to rankings displayed by respondents in this study demonstrates a significant space that has been created for interpretation and reconstruction of meaning. The implications of this analysis for policy makers, practitioners, and researchers are discussed.

The focus of this paper is the coalition United Kingdom government policy on university funding in England as a political economy. It depicts higher education as a public and private good in the context of international trends in ‘cost sharing’ and it addresses the centrality of economic drivers for the profile and orientation of higher education, particularly in England. On the basis of an examination of documents available in the public domain, it also assesses how new funding arrangements might embody a distinctive attribution of value to higher education in general and disciplinary practice in particular. This domain of inquiry is termed the political economy of funding because it seeks to examine the social and political meaning of these economic decisions and their implications.