Evaluation at Work: The Inner Workings of a Modern-Day Obsession

Evaluation at work has attracted much criticism and its damaging effects are well known, so why does it continue to gain ground in every field? Evaluation at Work: A Psychoanalytical Critique offers an original answer to this question: evaluation spreads because we want to be evaluated. Developing a critical reflection from a psychoanalytic perspective, it argues that workers are not mere victims of evaluation systems but are complicit in them.

In this fascinating volume, Bénédicte Vidaillet focuses on the aspects of our subjectivity that come into play in evaluation at work -our expectations, desires, need for recognition, our conceptions of ourselves at work, as well as our relationship with others such as colleagues, managers or clients - to explore how evaluation affects us, where it gets its evocative power, and what it stirs within us to make us want it, despite its detrimental effects in its currently practiced form. Chapters draw on real-life examples, case studies from a variety of organizations, and observations from clinical practice, to provide insight into the many mechanisms that have enabled evaluation to spread unimpeded through our subjective complicity in the process, revealing how they came to seem so innocuous.

This book will be of interest to scholars studying the topic of evaluation at work from a critical perspective as well as professionals who use evaluation systems or are under the pressure of evaluation in all sectors and organizations. By exposing the psychological mechanisms that evaluation uses to appeal to us, it gives each of us the tools we need to break free of its grasp.

Bénédicte Vidaillet is Professor in Work and Organizational Psychology, Université Paris Est Créteil, France and a Psychoanalyst.