among other things, to the
construction of expert knowledge in performance
measurement.19 Also, the reports of program evaluators
were then not issued publicly, which made
it more difficult for evaluators to be informed of
experiments carried out by their peers. In contrast,
the effectiveness of state auditors’ laboratories is
crucially connected with auditors’ ability to publish
and widely disseminate the successful accomplishment
of their performance measurement and
value-for-money experiments, both federally
(where the Federal Auditor General has a tradition
of publishing extensive value-for-money
reports) and in each of the Canadian Provinces.
Politicians and media widely use their reports,
and in so doing reinforce the claims of auditors
to expertise in these fields.
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