Managers as Evaluators

Abstract

This article examines how managers construct their version of the organization as a stable and objective reality and in doing so accomplish their work as managers. Two senior managers in an educational institution evaluated a group of their educational programs by interviewing all the teachers in the programs. The managers invoked traditional, positivist ideas of interviewing both for themselves and for the interviewees. However, analysis reveals the interviews not simply as opportunities for knowledge to be transmitted from one person to another but rather as interactional accomplishments in which the interviewer is deeply implicated in the production of answers. The managers, nevertheless, regard the answers as the result of an objective research process and use them as the basis for a report that promotes their view of the organization as the reality of organizational life, legitimated by evidence provided by the teachers themselves.

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