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The purpose of this paper is to explore the formation and composition of “regions” as places of care, both empirically and conceptually.

This paper draws on action-oriented research involving experiments aimed at designing, implementing and evaluating promising solutions to the entwined problems of a burgeoning elderly population and an increasing shortage of medical staff. It draws on ethnographic research conducted in 14 administrative areas in the Netherlands, a total of 273 in-depth interviews and over 1,000 h of observations.

This research challenges the understanding of a healthcare region as a clearly bounded topological area. It shows that organizations and professionals collaborate in a variety of different networks, some conterminous with the administrative region established by policymakers and others not. These networks are by nature unstable and dynamic. Attempts to form new regional collaborations with neighbouring organizations are complicated by existing healthcare governance and accountability structures that position organizations as competitors.

Policymakers should take the pre-established partnerships of healthcare organizations into account before delineating the area in which regionalization is meant to take place. A better alignment of governance and accountability structures is also needed for regionalization to occur in healthcare.

This paper combines insights from valuation studies with sociogeographical literature and provides a framework for understanding the assembling and disassembling of “regions”.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how organizations with diverse, interdependent functions with differing evaluative principles and differing ideas as to which behaviors are the most desirable, use management controls in their efforts to achieve innovation.

The authors conducted a case study of TechCo, an Australian technology start-up company, over a 12 month period.

The authors demonstrate how the clash of differing evaluative principles among interdependent teams led to the organization seeking new ways of organizing, which in turn, enabled the organization to better manage the interdependencies between the diverse functional areas. Additionally, the findings show how, through the use of management control systems, the organization was able to promote idea generation and “buy-in” across all functional areas, order competing priorities for innovation and set the agenda as to what constituted “acceptable” innovation for the organization to pursue.

The authors find that management controls play an important role in managing the tensions between differing evaluative principles in diverse functional areas in a heterarchical organization, and in supporting innovation in such an environment. As such, the authors provide the first research evidence on how management controls are used within a heterarchy to generate and select innovative ideas.

While it is acknowledged that societal context matters for employee expectations on training and development, the complexity of this relationship is still little explored. This paper aims to study which higher‐order principles employees of a German and Russian company use to justify their views on beneficial training and development in order to identify how evaluative repertoires differ between the two settings.

Building on interviews conducted in two professional services firms in Germany and Russia, the paper identifies patterns in the repertoire that employees use for evaluating training and development activities at each research site.

The findings reveal that employees working for the German company predominantly use the industrial principle for justifying their views on training and development. In contrast, employees in the Russian company apply market, industrial and domestic principles with a tendency for long‐term employees more often to justify their views using the market principle.

The case comparison points to variations in the evaluative repertoire that the paper explains with the societal context of Germany and Russia. By examining evaluative repertoires, companies learn what employees expect from training and development.

Applying convention theory, the paper introduces a promising, but so far neglected approach for linking employee expectations with societal context and for comparing boundaries between people across different settings.

The contrast between the value placed on discriminatory power in discussions of indexing and classification and on the transformation of a query into a set of relevant records dominant in information retrieval research has not yet been fully explored. The value of delivering relevant records in response to a query has been assumed by information retrieval research paradigms otherwise differentiated (the cognitive and the physical). Subsidiary concepts and measures (relevance and precision and recall) have been increasingly subjected to critiques. The founding assumption of the value of delivering relevant records now needs to be questioned. An enhanced capacity for informed choice is advocated as an alternative principle for system evaluation and design. This broadly corresponds to: the exploratory capability discussed in recent information retrieval research; the value of discriminatory power in classification and indexing; Giambattista Vico‘s critique of the unproductivity of Aristotelian methods of categorisation as routes to new knowledge; and, most significantly, to ordinary discourse conceptions of the value of information retrieval systems. The criterion of enhanced choice has a liberating effect, restoring man as an artificer and enabling a continuing dialectic between theory and practice. Techniques developed in classic information retrieval research can be adapted to the new purpose. Finally, the substitution of the principle of enhanced choice exemplifies the development of a true science, in which previous paradigms are absorbed into new as special cases. Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water‐rugs, and demi‐wolves, are clept All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous Nature Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike; Shakespeare. Macbeth. c.1606.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

This chapter will focus on the use of evaluative research in higher education policy analysis. The approach will be illustrated by reference to higher education policy in Scottish higher education, with particular reference to the longitudinal evaluative research of support of teaching and learning (T&L) (the Quality Enhancement Framework or QEF). The chapter will discuss the features of the research process which are shaped by evaluation theory. We adopt a theoretical position on policy research which foregrounds the situated experience of policy as a core research focus. Policy is depicted as being underscored by an implicit theory of change which is used to structure and orientate the research focus. The design of the research is characterised by the involvement of potential users of the research output, with implications on the way in which findings are articulated, presented and ultimately used, along with aspects of the evaluative research design. The case study of the QEF will be contextualised, and the intersection between the design features and theoretical approaches, and the use and usability of research outputs, will be established.

An NBM is a market form in that it is made of institutions and business models. It arises in a particular context where abundant novelty issuing from the producer side meets substantial search costs and evaluation difficulties on the consumer side. In a NBM consumers don’t necessarily know what they are searching for. These difficulties on the demand side are specifically caused by the fact that novel goods, which are experience goods, often require new “rules for choice” as new suites of evaluative criteria.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical framework, based on contemporary philosophical aesthetics, from which principled assessments of the aesthetic value of information organization frameworks may be conducted.

This paper identifies appropriate discourses within the field of philosophical aesthetics, constructs from them a framework for assessing aesthetic properties of information organization frameworks. This framework is then applied in two case studies examining the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and Sexual Nomenclature: A Thesaurus.

In both information organization frameworks studied, the aesthetic analysis was useful in identifying judgments of the frameworks as aesthetic judgments, in promoting discovery of further areas of aesthetic judgments, and in prompting reflection on the nature of these aesthetic judgments.

This study provides proof-of-concept for the aesthetic evaluation of information organization frameworks. Areas of future research are identified as the role of cultural relativism in such aesthetic evaluation and identification of appropriate aesthetic properties of information organization frameworks.

By identifying a subset of judgments of information organization frameworks as aesthetic judgments, aesthetic evaluation of such frameworks can be made explicit and principled. Aesthetic judgments can be separated from questions of economic feasibility, functional requirements, and user-orientation. Design and maintenance of information organization frameworks can be based on these principles.

This study introduces a new evaluative axis for information organization frameworks based on philosophical aesthetics. By improving the evaluation of such novel frameworks, design and maintenance can be guided by these principles.

The purpose of our article is to contribute to the further understanding of individual responses to pluralism, by studying in particular the role played by critiques and compromises in the formulation of such responses. Drawing on theoretical insights from the sociology of conventions, we look at the various modes of justification publicly advanced by French co-operators when engaging with co-operative principles. Our analysis allows us to identify three main instantiations, that is situated and flexible enactments, of these principles: pragmatic, reformist, and political. Our contribution to the understanding of pluralism and its instantiations by organizational members is threefold. First, in contrast with studies drawing on an institutional-logics perspective, our study shows that individual instantiations of pluralism rely not only on positive affirmations of logics but also on critical mobilizations of competing logics. Second, our study shows that pluralism can be understood not only as co-existing multiple logics, but also as different possible instantiations of the same logic, the ambiguity of which allows compromises to be settled with other logics. Third, we suggest that organizational members’ responses to pluralism often involve more than two logics, which are combined into a complex set of interdependent judgments. In addition, in relation to co-operative studies, our proposed typology provides a mapping that usefully extends the range of possibilities found in co-operators’ instantiations of co-operative principles, thus furthering our understanding of the diversity of the co-operative movement.

Examines the claim that materialist pragmatism is more coherent than alternative accounts of educational administration. Argues that the criteria of coherence provided by materialist pragmatists lack overall coherence and that there are no means for choosing between theories in the way they suggest. Arguments against the separation of factual and evaluative realms are unconvincing, and the materialist pragmatists′ claims that they have avoided foundationalism while providing a non‐positivist theory of science are questionable. Suggests that the administration of education requires a concrete rather than an abstract approach such as materialist pragmatism provides. Concludes with the thought that it is through the relentless criticism of all conceptualization that philosophy provides its service to educational administration.