Conversations with George

George Julnes has long been a friend and colleague to whom I often turned for provocative, engaging, theoretically grounded, complex (albeit convoluted at times), and fun conversations. I could count on George to question any point and to offer alternative perspectives. Thus, when I became editor of the American Journal of Evaluation (AJE) in 2014, I asked George to serve as editor of the section that we decided to title Professional Ethics and Values. A few words from what George wrote introducing the section in December 2014 illustrate his ability to raise critical questions:

But what exactly constitutes ethical practice? Whose interests are evaluators ethically obligated to serve? Recognizing that values represent beliefs or ideals shared by the members of a culture about what is good or desirable, in a pluralistic world what are the obligations of evaluators in the selection of which values are to be privileged in an evaluation? And, on what basis are evaluators to make judgments of what is ‘‘better’’ or an ‘‘improvement’’ (including, for whom and under what circumstances)? (Julnes & Bustelo, 2014, pp. 525).

Throughout my tenure as editor from 2014 through 2018, George, with his section coeditor Maria Bustelo, continued to provide insightful lenses through which to view articles selected for the section. In this short tribute to George, I take a journey through his contributions to AJE during that time. I choose to highlight his work as a way to bring him to life for us. If you knew George, you will appreciate hearing his voice. If you did not know him, let me introduce you.

George wrote unusually long notes to introduce each essay he selected for the section; his aim was to highlight the ethical issue and to raise relevant questions regarding professional values and ethics. The preceding quote was part of the introduction to Eleanor Chelimsky's essay, “Public interest values and program sustainability: some implications for evaluation practice” (2014). I hope these snippets of George's thinking tease you into wanting more, not only of what he wrote but also of what the accompanying essays put forward.

In March 2016, he introduced Ernie House's discussion (House, 2016) of how values are conceived in cognitive psychology and the implications for evaluation by raising concerns about how we judge value in public programs and policies. George argued that assessing value requires some working understanding of public interest, a concept that is “complex, controversial, and ever-changing” yet “not simply an empty concept devoid of actionable meaning” (pp. 100–101). He then questioned whether “our available evaluation methods may be better suited for representing some values than others” (p. 101).

For example, the analytic approach of identifying criteria of quality may result in an overly selective subset of what is to be valued … This prospect of analytic methods operating as a Procrustean Bed, one that chops off and distorts what doesn’t neatly fit, argues for making more and better use of qualitative methods that yield a more holistic approach to valuing (p. 101).

George suggested that a properly developed reconciliation of analytic and holistic valuing can be a “mixed-methods paradigm for valuing that builds upon and supports the more traditional mixed-methods focus on program processes and outcomes” (p. 102). He concluded by summarizing the implications of this multiple capacity view of cognitive processing that House develops.

George and Maria reprised their discussion of public interest with their introduction to Tom Schwandt's (2017) essay, “Professionalization, Ethics, and Fidelity to an Evaluation Ethos” (2017, pp. 546–553). They “review some of the recognized promises and challenges for professionalism in evaluation and highlight the promise of Schwandt's approach for managing the tension in professions between serving professionals and serving society” (Julnes & Bustelo, 2017, p. 540). They concluded:

if we want the societal benefits of evaluation as a profession, it is incumbent upon us to be strategic, to be proactive in establishing norms and structures that counter the self-serving tendencies. Schwandt’s suggested framing is promising for this reason—it provides a moral grounding connected to an interdependent citizen-co-owned professionalism, one that aspires to be less insular and so, potentially, less vulnerable to professionalism’s aforementioned [problems] (p. 544).

Much more than a book review, George's essay on Peter Dahler-Larsen’s (2011) The Evaluation Society offers a deep analysis of Dahler-Larsen's alternative lens on evaluation:

Underlying Dahler-Larsen’s concerns is an increasing tension between two trends. One trend is an unrelenting pressure for increasing complexity in how we make sense of our world—we use more complex metaphors in framing organizational and social dynamics, and we analyze more complex relationships. However, this trend, an evolutionary imperative really, conflicts with another, the desire for greater systemization in our sanctioned approaches to evaluation. Whether it’s government policies promoting the use of particular evaluation methods (e.g., random assignment experimental designs) or requiring adoption of specific performance management systems (e.g., GPRA, the Government Performance and Results Act), there is pressure to institutionalize current notions of best practices. Managing these two trends is at the heart of Dahler-Larsen’s argument, situated in terms of an evaluation society and evaluation as assisted sensemaking (Julnes, 2015, p. 585).

This journey would not be complete without a turn back in time to 1999 to an article published in AJE that George coauthored with Mel Mark and Gary Henry (Mark, Henry, & Julnes, 1999) long before he played any editing role with the journal. The abstract of this influential piece states:

We offer a new scheme for categorizing evaluation methods within four inquiry modes, which are “families” or clusters of methods: description, classification, causal analysis, and values inquiry. In addition, we briefly describe a set of alternative evaluation purposes. We argue that, together with a form of realist philosophy, the framework of inquiry modes and evaluation purposes (1) provides a common lexicon for evaluators, which may help the field in moving beyond past divisions, and (2) offers a useful approach to evaluation planning.

In short, George feared not to use his words to tackle challenging issues related to ethics and values of professional evaluation. Since I can no longer pick up the phone to talk about these issues with George, I will reread and enjoy his contributions to AJE as “conversations with George.”