A brilliant piece of work, adroitly fitted to the present state of affairs in program evaluation, devoted to a defensible and under-attended proposition - that we should understand programs through their recipients' -" Robert Stake, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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This book makes an important and unique contribution to evaluation' - "Michael Quinn Patton, The Union Institute, Minneapolis

"Personalizing Evaluation challenges the mainstream approach to program evaluation by inverting the traditional relationship between program and person. Saville Kushner shows how...

Challenging the mainstream approach to program evaluation by inverting the traditional relationship between program and person, this book addresses three concerns: learning about evaluation in relation to the experience of doing it; understanding evaluation as a form of personal expression; and, using evaluation to comment on people's lives.

In our reforming public institutions it sometimes feels as though the very ground of social and political contracts is shifting. The economic revolution embraced by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives is paralleled by a governance revolution in those same institutions which were designed to protect us from historical swings and ideological roundabouts. Our public institutions - for the most part the public sector and its professional groups - in the eyes of some provided stability, while for others they were a brake on change. Now, however, they have become conduits for political change and...