claims to expertise were therefore more likely to appeal to Alberta politicians and public servants, especially given the institutional emphasis on cost containment and short-term efficiency. Although the evaluators generally viewed performance measures as ‘‘very superficial’’ and ‘‘very shallow’’, we suggest that de-contextualized measures like those advocated by auditors possess a key rhetorical strength, generalizability (Latour, 1999). Evaluators appealed to restricted fields of production and specific expertise, in contrast to the auditors’ appeal to fields of wide-scale production and generalized expertise (Oakes et al., 1998). As a result, it is not surprising to find that program evaluation remains a marginal practice in the Alberta government – although there are a few ‘‘strong pockets of support’’ around it (Bradley, 2001).20