Constructing Accountability: The Development and Delegation of Outcome Evaluation in American Social Work

A common explanation for the rise in outcome evaluation among American human service agencies is the concomitant spread of performance-based funding in the late twentieth century. Although not dismissing this resource-dependence explanation, I argue that a further-reaching historical perspective combined with a social constructivist lens adds critical context to this important development in the human services sector. Adopting this approach and focusing on social work's history, I call attention to past efforts to delegate evaluative responsibility to service providers, framing these attempts as part of an ongoing negotiation of professional expertise and authority. Based on this review, I argue that modern agency-led outcome evaluation reprises historically recurring dilemmas and missteps. At the same time, this system of evaluation exhibits a historically novel and characteristically neoliberal attribution of outcomes to distinct organizations over replicable service technologies. The article concludes by drawing out practical implications for incentivizing and implementing outcome evaluation.