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Program reviews are standard practice in higher education. Yet, due to the infancy of the leadership discipline, little is known about the process of conducting reviews of leadership programs. Through interviewing 13 experienced leadership program reviewers in both curricular and co-curricular contexts, the authors of this study aim to address this gap in the literature. A comparative case study was employed to learn more about what encompasses a leadership program review and elicit experience-based practices for facilitating leadership program reviews in higher education. A thematic analysis of the interview transcripts was conducted by the researchers and the four major themes of review logistics, reviewer experiences, review outcomes, and lessons learned are shared in this study. The researchers found contextual factors related to the institutions and leadership programs, reviewer facilitation skills, setting clear expectations of the review process and outcomes, identifying resources, and nuances related to power considerations and political dynamics to be primary factors in conducting leadership program reviews. The authors close by offering implications for research and practice based on these findings.

Drawing on sociolinguistics, this chapter proposes an encoding–decoding perspective on evaluation, conceptualizing codes as interpretive schemas that are encoded by firms and decoded by audiences. A key element in this process is code complexity, denoting combinations of interdependent elements. We demonstrate that the evaluation of code complexity depends on the type of audience (professionals and laypersons) and the type of complexity (technological and aesthetic). We analyze the attribution of awards by professionals and the public in luxury watchmaking, featuring three mechanisms: the social embeddedness of audiences, their motivation for evaluation and supply-and-demand matching. The results attest to significant differences in the evaluation of technological and aesthetic code complexity by professionals and laypersons. There is a premium attributed to aesthetic code complexity by professionals and a premium attributed to technological complexity by laypersons. Finding the right type and level of code complexity to pursue in their offerings is a key strategic challenge for producers.