Self-Management, Digital Transition and Culture of Evaluation

In an era of intensified digitalization, information asymmetries, algorithmic governance and shrinking trust in institutions, self-evaluation emerges as a critical practice for organizational resilience, democratic accountability and reflexive management. Beyond its traditional role as an accountability mechanism, self-evaluation—when embedded in digital processes and infrastructures—can foster collective learning, reflexivity and distributed decision-making, while also exposing new risks: surveillance, managerialism and data inequalities.

This session invites theoretical, empirical and practice-based contributions that interrogate how self-evaluation functions within the digital transition across policy domains (education, health, social services, public administration). Priority will be given to studies that examine: the affordances and limits of digital and AI-enhanced evaluation tools; tensions between external evaluation and internal reflexivity; how self-evaluation practices redistribute power within organizations and between stakeholders; the pedagogies and training practices to improve an evaluative culture; and evidence on the organizational effects and unintended consequences of self-evaluation. We particularly welcome research that study how self-evaluation can produce rigorous, situated knowledge that strengthens democratic governance and collective capacity to navigate turbulent social transformations.