I don’t pretend to understand the academic publishing mechanisms that allowed this to exist; it is a book-length treatment of a topic that is exhausted after the first seventy or so pages, and tired long before then. It’s not that there aren’t a hundred thousand other books like this one, just that I’ll never understand how such niche drivel gets produced so consistently. Maybe it’s that the entire book reads like a justification for its own existence, and for a career spent iterating on a framework that is unvalidatable and “theoretically grounded” in a series of rhetorical questions. I can imagine this approach being wildly popular among the horde of academics who recognize in Harvey and Kitson’s work something of themselves and want to applaud it.

If you are, like me, reading this for work, and for some reason you are reading the Storygraph reviews before the book, and you don’t happen to think that I’m an arrogant know-it-all shithead (or at least that I’m wrong), then I suggest you read at most the first three chapters and at least skim chapter three. If you boil it down, I think all that it is possible to take from this book that common sense and exposure to any one article about program evaluation or systems thinking won’t give you are the two boxes on page 41 showing the outline of the PARIHS framework compared to the i-PARIHS framework. Everything else is as useful and interesting as bad automatic writing.