Seeing Like an Organization: How to Avoid the Failures of Corrupting Measures

In his seminal work, Seeing Like a State, James Scott (1998) drew an astounding connection between how governments monitor their interests through measurement practices which render citizens and their territory “legible”. This grid, which is overlaid upon a complex world, while useful, reduces the complexities of human life. Governments’ impulses to create uniform, legible structures correlate with a degradation of the built and natural environments, prioritizing control over flourishing. In this session, we will apply the insights of Seeing Like a State to modern evaluation practice, showing how our focus on measuring, collecting “objective” data, can lead to an organization that is an impoverished human environment. We will cover concepts such as corrupting measures, and show how to collect data in ways that encourage, rather than diminish, the flourishing of all involved.
Click to fill survey.