Evaluating Appreciative Inquiry: A Relational Constructionist Perspective

Appreciative inquiry (AI) has become increasingly popular as a social constructionist approach to organizational change and development. Many claims are made about its status and value but there are few published evaluation studies. Furthermore, some interesting and important issues arise as to how AI can be evaluated appropriately – given its social constructionist context. The heart of our argument is that AI could appropriately and usefully be evaluated using the approach of ‘responsive evaluation’. We lay out our views by putting forward a particular, relational, narrative of social construction processes. We then draw upon this relational narrative to develop three themes. One theme is that both AI and social constructionism should be viewed as variable social constructions and not fixed ‘things’. This means that AI manifests in many different ways in different local-cultural and local-historical contexts. 1 A related theme is that, if theory and method co-define one another, then AI is much more than just a method. Finally, viewing evaluation as a variable social construction suggests that some evaluation practices will be more consistent with the premises of relational constructionism and AI than others. These themes are developed in several parts. In the first, we briefly introduce AI, the links that have been made between it and social constructionism, and potential implications of these links for evaluation. In the second, we outline the defining premises of relational constructionism. In the third, we examine AI, its multiple meanings, and its central premises. We then explore links between relational constructionism and AI. This brings us to the fifth part in which we introduce evaluation and its potential relations with AI. Finally, we write of how AI and evaluation could be performed in ways that reflect relational constructionist premises.