Metric Power

by | Jul 31, 2016 | Research Publications

Author:

Beer, David

Abstract:

This chapter introduces the concept of metric power. It begins to contextualise this concept by exploring its links to contemporary expansions in the data assemblage. It then focusses upon the role of metrics in relation to questions of power, governance, and social ordering. It does this through an examination of the concept of neoliberalism. The chapter argues that metrics can be understood to be the means or mechanisms of the realisation and spread of neoliberal forms of competition. It then concludes by outlining the direction and structure of the book, most notably in relation to its focus upon the relations between measurement, circulation, and possibility.

Document:

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55649-3

References:
  1. Beer, D. (2013). Popular culture and new media: The politics of circulation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Beer, D. (2015a). The apple watch and the problem of our creeping connectivity. Sociological Imagination. Accessed July 6, 2015, from http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/17447
  3. Beer, D. (2015b). Productive measures: Culture and measurement in the context of everyday neoliberalism. Big Data and Society, 2(1), 1–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  4. boyd, d., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon. Information Communication and Society, 15(5), 662–679.Google Scholar
  5. Brenner, N., Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2010). Variegated neoliberalization: Geographies, modalities, pathways. Global Networks, 10(2), 182–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. Brenner, N., & Theodore, N. (2002). Cities and the geographies of “actually existing neoliberalism”. In N. Brenner & N. Theodore (Eds.), Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe (pp. 2–32). Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. Brown, W. (2015b). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books.Google Scholar
  8. Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2013). The new way of the world: On neoliberal society. London: Verso.Google Scholar
  9. Davies, W. (2013). When is a market not a market? ‘Exemption’, ‘externality’ and ‘exception’ in the case of European State Aid rules. Theory Culture and Society, 30(2), 32–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. Davies, W. (2014). The limits of neoliberalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
  11. Davies, W. (2015a). The happiness industry: How the government and big business sold us well-being. London: Verso.Google Scholar
  12. Davies, W. (2015b). The return of social government: From ‘socialist calculation’ to ‘social analytics. European Journal of Social Theory. Online first. doi: 10.1177/1368431015578044.Google Scholar
  13. Day, R. E. (2014). Indexing it all: The subject in the age of documentation, information, and data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  14. Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: Communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. Deloitte. (2015). Global human capital trends 2015: Leading in the new world of work. London: Deloitte University Press.Google Scholar
  16. Desrosières, A. (2015). Retroaction: How indicators feed back onto quantified actors. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The world of indicators: The making of governmental knowledge through quantification (pp. 329–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. Elden, S. (2007). Governmentality, calculation, territory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25(3), 562–580.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Espeland, W. N. (1997). Authority by the numbers: Porter on quantification, discretion, and the legitimation of expertise. Law and Social Inquiry, 22(4), 1107–1133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  19. Espeland, W. N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 401–436.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  21. Flew, T. (2014). Six theories of neoliberalism. Thesis Eleven, 122(1), 49–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. Foucault, M. (2002b). Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, (Vol. 3). London: Penguin.Google Scholar
  23. Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  24. Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  25. Foucault, M. (2013). Lectures on the will to know: Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971 and Oedipal Knowledge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. Foucault, M. (2014). On the government of the living: Lectures at the Collège de France 1979–1980. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  27. Gane, N. (2012). The governmentalities of neoliberalism: Panopticism, post-panopticism and beyond. Sociological Review, 60(4), 611–634.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  28. Gane, N. (2014a). The emergence of neoliberalism: Thinking through and beyond Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. Theory Culture and Society, 31(4), 3–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  29. Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In G. Burchill, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 1–51). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
  30. Hall, S. (2011). The neo-liberal revolution. Cultural Studies, 25(6), 705–728.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  31. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
  32. Illouz, E. (2007). Cold intimacies: The making of emotional capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
  33. Jessop, B. (2002). Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: A state-theoretical perspective. In N. Brenner & N. Theodore (Eds.), Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe (pp. 105–125). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
  34. Kantor, J., & Streitfeld, D. (2015, August 15). Inside Amazon: Wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace. The New York Times. Accessed August 19, 2015, from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=0
  35. Kapoor, N. (2013). The advancement of racial neoliberalism in Britain. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(6), 1028–1046.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  36. Kitchin, R. (2014a). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  37. Kittler, F. (2006). Number and numeral. Theory Culture and Society, 23(7–8), 51–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. Lazzarato, M. (2009). Neoliberalism in action: Inequality, insecurity and the reconstitution of the social. Theory Culture and Society, 26(6), 109–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  39. Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
  40. Mirowski, P. (2013). Never let a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown. London: Verso.Google Scholar
  41. Oksala, J. (2013). Feminism and neoliberal governmentality. Foucault Studies, 16(1), 32–53.Google Scholar
  42. Owens, P. (2015, January 31). Interview—patricia owens. E-International Relations. Accessed February 10, 2015, from http://www.e-ir.info/2015/01/31/interview-patricia-owens/
  43. Peck, J. (2010). Constructions of neoliberal reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  44. Peck, J. (2013). Explaining (with) neoliberalism. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1(2), 132–157.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. Peck, J., & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. In N. Brenner & N. Theodore (Eds.), Spaces of neoliberalism: Urban restructuring in North America and Western Europe (pp. 33–57). Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
  46. Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
  47. Rose, N. (1991). Governing by numbers: Figuring out democracy. Accounting Organization and Society, 16(7), 673–692.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  48. Rose, N. (1999). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self (2 ed.). London: Free Association Books.Google Scholar
  49. Rottenburg, R., & Merry, S. E. (2015). A world of indicators: The making of governmental knowledge through quantification. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The world of indicators: The making of governmental knowledge through quantification (pp. 1–33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  50. Scharff, C. (2014). Gender and neoliberalism: Exploring the exclusions and contours of neoliberal subjectivities. Theory, Culture and Society. Accessed August 20, 2015, from http://theoryculturesociety.org/christina-scharff-on-gender-and-neoliberalism/
  51. Schiller, D. (2014). Digital depression: Information technology and economic crisis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
  52. Stables, J. (2015, April 9). US Insurance firm offers trackable Fitbit for lower insurance premiums. Wearable. Accessed Junuary 12, 2015, from http://www.wareable.com/wearable-tech/us-insurance-firm-offers-trackable-fitbits-for-lower-premiums-1032
  53. Stigler, S. M. (1986). The history of statistics: The measurement of uncertainty before 1900. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
  54. Stiglitz, J., Sen, A., & Fitoussi, J. P. (2010). Mismeasuring our lives: Why GDP doesn’t add up. New York: The New Press.Google Scholar
  55. Thrift, N. (2005). Knowing capitalism. London: Sage.Google Scholar
  56. Venn, C. (2009). Neoliberal political economy, biopolitics and colonialism: A transcolonial genealogy of inequality. Theory Culture and Society, 26(6), 206–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  57. Venugopal, R. (2015). Neoliberalism as concept. Economy and Society, 44(2), 165–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar