Albert Hirschman affirmed that "Judith Tendler's fine insights into the differential characteristics and side-effects of thermal and hydropower, and of generation and distribution, contributed in many ways to the formation of my views." Judith Tendler, in turn, wrote that Hirschman had taught her "to look where I never would have looked before for insight into a country's development," and that in Albert's work a researcher who was "patient enough" would find "a rich complexity of both success and failure, efficiency alongside incompetence, order cohabiting with disorder."
Reconstructing the theoretical roots of interpretive social science, this text shows how Hirschman's possibilism lies at the base of the original way Tendler practiced evaluation and anticipated many current developments. The continuing vitality of their thought enables us to trace the outlines of possibilist evaluation.
Reconstructing the theoretical roots of interpretive social science, this text shows how Hirschman's possibilism lies at the base of the original way Tendler practiced evaluation and anticipated many current developments. The continuing vitality of their thought enables us to trace the outlines of possibilist evaluation.
"In her new book, Possibilism and Evaluation: Judith Tendler and Albert Hirschman, Dr. Nicoletta Stame gives us a fresh perspective on Tendler and Hirschman, two provocative thinkers who were unafraid to stand apart in their thinking and practice, and whose scholarship was full of prescient of ideas that are still 'leading edge' in evaluation today. Tendler and Hirschman covered significant territory not only worth remembering, but truly inspiring for us today, and their work beckons evaluators to reflect on questions such as: How can we harness the power of Theory of Change in evaluation to break away from linear logic modeling and capture a flexible perspective that leaves room for ambiguity? How can we be open to see and study what has worked in the face of adversity? How do we represent human creativity in our evaluations? Stame shows connections between this still avant-garde work with evaluation scholars like Rogers, Schwandt and Patton, and with approaches and methods suchas mixed methods, qualitative evaluation, Appreciative Evaluation, and others. We are grateful to Stame for bringing into the light the stimulating and robust body of work of Tendler and Hirschman, with their unflinching challenging of norms that still bind evaluators in many quarters today. The complex concept of possibilism in evaluation is an important contribution to evaluation scholarship-evaluation that invites respect of people, ethical practice, and creative insight toward what makes communities resilient and thriving." -Tessie Tzavaras Catsambas, CEO/CFO, EnCompass LLC; Former President, American Evaluation Association