Also, auditors’ laboratories are ultimately aimed at the development of quasi-universal measures and standards of performance, which, like generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), are presumed to facilitate users’ comparison of performance across different settings. Auditors’ 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