In my efforts to refresh my social theory and develop new perspectives on evaluation I recently attended a social constructivism conference on Communication, Collaboration and Relationships in the Faroe Islands[1]. I’d been alerted to this opportunity by one of the organisers, Gro Emmertsen Lund, a Danish organisational consultant and author with a shared interest in reshaping evaluation (Lund, 2011).
As a freelance action researcher, this was my annual dose of CPD. Like many people from the UK, this was new territory for me and I couldn’t resist the location and the conference aims to ‘increase the motivation and the joy of learning, teaching, leading and serving’ and ‘bring public services into synchrony with emerging world conditions’. One of the keynote speakers was Ken Gergen who, amongst his many writings, articulates a vision of the researcher as an active agent in fashioning the future and research as a form of social action (Gergen, 2014).