ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what and how evaluative knowledge is generated and used by managers and decision makers within an organizational setting. We aim here to fill a gap in the analysis of the use of evaluation within organizations by bringing the notion of organizational knowledge to the forefront. Organizations, in fact, continuously create knowledge by reconstructing existing perspectives, frameworks, or premises on a day-to-day basis (Nonaka, 1994). Evaluation is part of this organizational knowledge, which evaluators, program designers, and program managers share within and outside the organization. The challenge then is not only to detect the use of discrete pieces of evaluation studies, but rather to explore how and to what extent streams of evaluative knowledge reinforce organizational knowledge-creating processes over time. We aim to put forward a new viewpoint on evaluation use, shifting the attention from evaluation studies to streams of evaluative knowledge, which contain a judgment or help managers make a judgment.
