Patton Responds to Fetterman, Wandersman, and Snell-Johns

Those unschooled in appreciative inquiry should not be misled into believing that Fetterman’s response represents that approach, which involves more than noting a few areas of agreement before turning defensive and disputatious, all the while denying the same. Labeling the book and his work empowerment evaluation (EE) scholarship and denying its explicit and overt political premises and agenda is disingenuous at best and an unfortunate switch in tactics, as owning the political nature of EE has been one of its strengths. The very word empowerment is fundamentally a political term, inherently provocative when joined with evaluation. This is not to deny or diminish the serious scholarship undertaken and reported in the book, but to pretend that such scholarship is nonpolitical and nonadversarial is contrary to the very philosophical and epistemological foundations of EE, or so it seems to me. Wandersman and Snell-Johns strike me as more straightforward in this regard, acknowledging the political context within which EE offers an alternative. Fetterman asserts that my review strays beyond the purposes of the authors. When Fetterman invited me to undertake the review, he did not impose any such limitations. Goodness, if reviewers of any kind were restricted from offering their own criteria, critics would soon be out of business. That said, I actually believe I exercised considerable restraint in attempting to stay within the bounds of the book’s purpose and not moving into a more general debate about EE. The book delineates and aims to empirically substantiate 10 EE principles. I acknowledge that as validation of the 10 principles, a great many improved program outcomes are ascribed to EE. However, the attribution data linking EE to those outcomes is weak and would not, in my judgment, be taken as definitive in most program evaluations, a prime case in point being the hyperbolic attribution of “construction of one of the largest wireless systems in the country” to EE. My passing reference to Iraq was with regard to those who, knowingly or unknowingly, substitute their strong beliefs and already made up minds for hard evidence, a temptation to which we are all subject. Given Fetterman’s response, readers can decide the relevance of the analogy. In contrast, Wandersman and Snell-Johns sound a more circumspect note in acknowledging that the evidence base for EE’s effects is still in an early stage and that more is needed, which is all I was saying. What Fetterman boldly labels misstatements in my review are actually differences of interpretation, quite a different matter. What Wandersman and Snell-Johns label misconceptions are actually areas of disagreement, also quite a different matter

Context (archaeology · Empowerment · Epistemology · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change · History · Law · Philosophy

• Empowerment Evaluation as Evaluation Ideology

  Open Access•Nick L Smith•American Journal of Evaluation•2007

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