{"word_count": 294, "character_count": 1969}
Florence Jany-Catrice (2020)Social Work &#38; Society, Volume 18(1), pp. 1-10. Open accessAbstract. In the field of the Welfare State, the evaluation of public policies is more and more becoming a series of small devices (programmes, projects, nudges) aiming at measuring the performance of public services. This transforms the scope of the evaluation process and transforms the way by which “the effectiveness” of social policies is revealed and measured. This paper defends the idea that the claim for "performance" is one of the symptoms of the dissolution of evaluation of public policies in the measurement of the performance of public services. This is also a way of confusing individual performance with social progress.Extract. “Structural changes in the Welfare Sate (section 2), often denoted by its “modernization,” have tended to link two types of approaches increasingly tightly together. The first type includes approaches to evaluation rooted in a public service culture (as when we speak of evaluating public policies); the second consists of approaches that make considerable use of numerical indicators to legitimize, ex ante and ex post, the choices made in public action. Apart from the fact that this intertwining of public policy evaluation and performance measurement tends to blur the distinction, introduced by A. Desrosières (2008) between the “constructivist” and “realist” approaches, it also validates two structural tendencies. The first is the gradual shift away from the Social Welfare State towards the state as a mere “service provider,” the second, a gradual tendency towards a blurring of the distinction between individual and collective issues. The free flow of concepts between the individual and social level has facilitated the disintegration of collective performance and progress into a collection of individual performances, thereby excluding consideration of how to preserve the common goods.”Link to the reviewDownload link