Evaluación del daño en el tejido sinovial

This section positions the problem of how power, data and knowledge are intimately related vis-à-vis germane theoretical work from Information Systems, Knowledge Management and Development Studies. All these literatures feature calls for more research into power relations, but the topic remains marginal in each. The positioning of the theoretical focus does not provide exhaustive accounts of work in each of these fields, but canvases indicative examples to set the scene before the more in-depth discussion of DIKW and the 6P sensitivities in relation to impact evaluation that follows.

3.2.1

Power in IS, KM and Development Studies

Information Systems literature investigates diverse issues around information and power, and also shows how studying power is often avoided. Markus’s (1983) paper drew attention to how a management information system (MIS) could transform data flows by changing who has access to what data, and the resulting political conflicts between organisational departments (ibid: 438). Feldman & March (1981) highlighted the importance of information in professional and organisational symbolic behaviours. This contrasted with the established view which suggested information resources are primarily deployed in rational decision-making processes. Walsham’s (2001: 57-58) review of power in Information Systems acknowledged diverse concerns: how the language of efficiency is used to gain power (Kling

7Iacano, 1984); the importance of Foucault’s work on power/knowledge inseparability, and how techniques and procedures specify legitimate accounts of truth via regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980); how information systems contain data that are representations of knowledge

and truth (Haraway, 1991); and the importance of surveillance, as a form of control (Zuboff, 1988; Foucault, 1977; Knights et al, 1993: 990) and in monitoring (Lyon, 1993; Attewell, 1991). However, Willcocks (2004) and Willcocks & Lioliou (2011) contend that power/knowledge research has often been avoided in Information Systems, even after seminal works advocated critical approaches (e.g. Orlikowsky & Baroudi, 1991). In Wilcock’s (2004: 270) view, although Zuboff’s “In the Age of the Smart Machine” (1988) became a bestseller in popular technology and management fields, its Foucauldian influences “fell away almost completely” as others took up Zuboff’s insights. Furthermore, Introna (2003: 239-241) observed how power/knowledge issues in Information Systems journals are often perceived as “nuisances”. He argued that such nuisances actually constituted the very community and field of Information Systems itself. Willcocks (2004: 241) even suggested that Foucault would study marginalisation within sites of information/knowledge work today in order to understand contemporary power/knowledge dynamics, such as those embedded in “digital economy rhetoric” (Willcocks & Lioliou, 2011: 6).

Knowledge management has also featured work on power relations. Easterby-Smith et al (2007) acknowledged the importance of power relations. Hislop et al (2000) looked at knowledge controlled by competing groups in organisations, and Hayes & Walsham (2001) described political enclaves in groupware-mediated knowledge work. Snowden (2002: 4) and Dalkir (2011) both describe different generations of knowledge management, in which the earlier generations either rode roughshod over “primitive cultures” (Snowden, 2002: 4), or saw top-down management seek to control knowledge assets, products and containers (Dalkir, 2011). Dalkir’s emerging third generation features more top-down categorising and organising of knowledge, whereas Snowden sees a more positive and expansive view of knowledge management in products and complex flows. However, neither explicitly open up questions of power or politics. One key collection in the field is Easterby-Smith and Lyles’ “Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management” (2011), but power relations are referred to on only 10 of 700 pages, and power is not a central theme in any of the 29 articles. Plaskoff’s (2011: 200) contribution does lament the lack of attention to power relations in communities of practice research (see also: Contu & Willmott, 2003), and Hayes’ (2011: 89) contribution acknowledges the field’s general neglect of power/knowledge. Power hierarchies are mentioned, but only as brief comments in the collected articles, and as related to organisational learning (Brandi & Elkjaer, 2011: 28; Roloff et al, 2011: 260), intercultural relations (Taylor & Osland, 2011: 587-90), or Asian knowledge management (Snell & Hong

(2011: 639). In other works, Spender & Scherer (2007: 13) reference Foucault (1980) in warning about the suppression of power relations inherent in claims of rational decision- making or guarantees of truth. In contrast, one author who has repeatedly foregrounded issues of power and politics is Blackler (e.g. 1993; 1995; 2009; 2011) and his contributions figure prominently in this study.

In Knowledge Management for development (KM4D), research has largely emphasised contextual studies over theoretical debates. Power is considered in terms of hierarchies and status, as well as how the powerful construct knowledge to serve their interests and positions. For example, van der Ham et al (2013) show how in lower- and middle-income countries, healthcare users are perceived as weaker than healthcare professionals due to the latter’s knowledge and status. Swaans et al (2013) illustrate how innovation platforms must address stakeholder power differentials. Solnes Miltenburg et al (2013) discuss power hierarchies and knowledge cultures as they interact in Tanzanian healthcare settings. Millington et al (2016) propose a toolkit to empower communities to design their monitoring evidence. Deepek et al (2016) advocate community-based media and personal story production to offset knowledge inequalities, and Jenkin et al (2016) propose the use of films as forms of legitimate local knowledge construction. Such literature draws on bottom-up, community-based knowledge production as an alternative to top-down planning or evaluation controls, thus promoting empowerment for community groups, wherein a knowledge deficit is presumed to exist, and local cultivation is presumed to be a solution. Only Saito-Jenson & Pasgaard (2014) draw on conceptual resources from social practice theories, in their case actor network and research by Mosse (2005), to problematise project success as a result of translations between diverse actors in many sites. Similarly, Brown (2010) offers conceptual insights into multiple knowledge forms and the conflicts between them.

In Development Studies itself, theoretical analysis of power relations is more mature, spanning modernisation as economic catch up with the West during the post-colonial era (see Sumner, 2006), and dependency theory (e.g. Cardoso & Faletto, 1979) or world systems theory (e.g. Wallerstein, 1974) where power is part of macro-level economic and political inequalities. Participatory development has attended to micro-settings, emphasizing empowerment of specific local communities as a response to bureaucratic or market related inequalities (e.g. Chambers, 1997), or small-d development (e.g. Bebbington et al, 2008, Banks & Hulme, 2012: 13). Foucault’s analytics of power/knowledge (1977; 2001) has been influential in Critical

Development Studies, and adopted by writers such as Ferguson, Escobar, Li, and Scott. Ferguson (1990/1994) described technocratic knowledge as producing anti-politics effects, because it ignored locally defined needs, aspirations, history, politics, and even economic reality. Escobar deconstructed development discourse, questioning its effects in development encounters (1995/2012). Li (2007) recounted a billion-dollar World Bank program to remake society in East Timor, where development experts deployed neoliberal knowledge (ibid: 230). Scott (1998) described large-scale modernisation failures that ignored local know-how and participation, relying instead on technical planning rationalities and schematic knowledge that failed to capture the complexity of lived lives. Thus, in Development Studies, there are mature conceptualisations of power relations, drawing on economic modernisation, Marxist political economy, and Foucauldian discursive/cultural analysis.

3.2.2

Positioning practice and power in data/knowledge construction

The current study straddles what might be considered a Marxist focus on activities of labour and production, and a Foucauldian concern with discursive formations. It situates power in the micro-practices of (NGOs) constructing impact data/knowledge products for exchange. Studies by Blackler (1995; 2011), Avgerou (2002), Brigham & Hayes (2013), and Hayes & Westrup (2014) encourage attempts to understand the production of data and knowledge and the accompanying power dynamics. Such works, in different ways, problematise power within the social practices of data/knowledge construction.

After critiquing five popular images of knowledge in organisations, Blackler (1995: 1023- 1025) had argued for viewing knowledge itself as political processes. The five images focused on were: knowledge as concepts, cognition or abstractions in the brain (which he termed “embrained” knowledge); knowledge in our physical interactions in specific settings (“embodied”); culturally shared narratives, language or metaphors (“encultured”); knowledge embedded in organisational routines (“embedded”); and knowledge or information as encoded into books, or electronic media such as emails or databases (“encoded”). Blackler’s perspective on knowledge as political processes - provisional, pragmatic, situated, contested and mediated - rather than a universal expert asset, problematised the power and politics inherent in analysing, managing, sharing, and storing, in other words, doing knowledge work. Blackler suggested that the five popular images of knowledge in fact aligned with “the needs of

contemporary capitalism”, globalisation and technology-centric knowledge work (ibid: 1040), and thus raised issues of domination and subordination (ibid: 1042). Blackler’s shift to knowledge as processes, opened the door to investigation of power and politics.

Referring to Lyotard (1984) and his notion of commodified knowledge, Avgerou (2002: 85- 89) discussed how politics and power were implicated in the deployment of ICTs in global development contexts. Here, dominant market-based technological and managerial rationalities and discourses, encounter or subjugate local knowledges, such as shared family knowledge, traditions of conflict avoidance, communal or non-economic-centred knowledge, affectual, traditional or emotional knowledge (Avgerou, 2002: 77). Blackler’s concern with situated activities of knowing, and Avgerou’s concern with global rationalities complement each other in terms of how one might theorise power dynamics and effects where different knowledges meet in development evaluation encounters.

Brigham & Hayes (2013) looked at such encounters in an e-development initiative, arguing that the mix of technologies and conceptual models for evaluating performance and impact had the consequence of boosting the centrality of donor organisations in setting NGO goals and shaping their services. In a further article Hayes & Westrup (2014) interrogated the role of consultancy organisations in development, questioning their perceived objective, apolitical stance. Consultancies instead, sought to expand and stabilize their positions and influence in development networks, pervasively deploying technologies, models and frameworks in areas such as impact evaluation (ibid: 22). These tactics promote perceptions of professionalism, transparency and accountability, illustrated for example in an Oxfam report on effective consultancies in development work (Rowley & Rubin, 2006: 4), or in efficiencies and effectiveness as required in a DFID call to establish a global evaluation agreement (Lietch, 2012: 2). Consultancy tactics and discourses paint NGOs as unprofessional, ineffective, or lagging in terms of IT capabilities. This suggests consultancy tactics, measures and technical models used to fix social problems are not value-free or neutral, but politically geared towards reconfiguring perceptions of evaluating, perceptions of NGOs, and stabilising a consultancy’s own positions and ability to secure future contracts (Brigham & Hayes, 2013: 25). In these ways, such models and frameworks appear to promote efficiency and professional values, but can function as Trojan horses for the promotion of neoliberal development agendas (ibid: 27). These critical perspectives draw on approaches to practices, institutional (Avgerou, 2002), and

socio-organisational, such as activity theory (Blacker, 1995; 2011), or actor networks (Hayes & Westrup, 2014) to understand power and practice in data/knowledge intensive work. The current study theorises power/data/knowledge relations as key parts of impact evaluation data/knowledge construction, wherein certain impact data/knowledge is legitimised and made visible by prescriptive and widely distributed methods in response to sector demands, and where other data/knowledge, impacts, effects and configurations of the demand-method-result dynamic are discarded, delegitimised, or subjugated. Exposing and making palatable this bifurcation of data and knowledge for action by evaluators, NGOs or donors involves two arguments. It requires decentring the pervasive received wisdom of DIKW and the conceptual assumptions and omissions that underpin impact evaluation. However, exposure alone is not sufficient. It also involves creating alternatives and sensitivities to power and politics that evaluation data/knowledge practitioners can pragmatically reflect or draw upon. The next two sections consider firstly decentring DIKW and secondly, alternative sensitivities.