Work injury compensation and pensions are often determined according to medical disability rating scales attributing a percentage to each impaired body part or function. Incorporated into central medical–administrative networks of committees and examinations, these produce disability as a calculable space. This article examines the specific case of the Israeli National Insurance regulations regarding work injuries of 1956 and analyzes the shifted order they set. Looking at this system in the specific historical context of transition from the British Mandate workmen’s compensation (...) system to the “disability percentages” system, provides insight into the process of structuring and stabilizing durable numerical forms and the production of centralized government. Drawing on conceptualizations regarding the sociotechnical role of classification systems, I contend that through encoding and calculating classifications of disability, heterogeneity is eliminated and an ordering based on physiology is “black boxed,” illustrating the importance of technoscientific formations in structuring the “medical model of disability.”. (shrink)

This study explores Big Data practices at Facebook through an investigation of the role of commensuration or ‘the transformation of different qualities into a common metric’ in the structuration of analysis and interaction with a major online social media platform. It proposes a conceptual framework and demonstrates the empirical potential of a pragmatic approach based on reading published materials and available documentation. Facebook’s Data Warehousing and Analytics Infrastructure serves as an illustrative example to begin tracing out and describe data assemblages (...) in more detail. In being attentive to the motivations, drivers and challenges engineers face when dealing with Big Data, it is argued that their solutions can enable and support but also constrain specific analytical and transactional capabilities or data flows between various devices and actors. The analysis thus moves beyond methodological critiques of the utility of Big Data that lack empirical support and specificity. It is further argued that analytics not just describe but also actively participate in the enactment of social worlds, thereby opening possibilities for new markets or market segments to arise. Online sociality accounts for a model of the social that makes it visible and measurable qua markets inviting data recontextualisation and the creation of value along multiple axes. Contra Facebook’s claim to make the web more ‘social’, an investigation of commensuration brings to the fore the question how the social is accounted for in the first place. (shrink)

This article contributes to a growing conversation about the role of numbers in promoting gendered agendas in potentially contradictory ways. Drawing from interviews with gender advisors—the professionals tasked with mainstreaming gender in development projects—in an East African country, I begin from the paradox that gender advisors articulate a strong preference for qualitative data to best capture the lives of the women they aim to assist while voicing a need for quantitative metrics. I demonstrate that gender advisors come to imagine metrics (...) as expeditious bureaucratic tools able to inspire cooperation from otherwise reluctant coworkers. I argue that development organizations are gendered in ways—acutely seen in how advisors struggle, are sidelined, and attempt to advance their goals with numbers—that lead to the utility of valuing quantitative metrics over qualitative ones. I establish two theoretical contributions: Gendered organizations theory is essential to understanding the adoption and globalization of performance metrics, and in an age of evidence-based decision making, the utility of quantified data to garner resources is heightened, rewarding those who adopt quantified knowledge production. I coin the term “the paradox of quantified utility” to describe how these material advantages encourage even skeptics to value quantitative metrics. (shrink)

Introduction: Is soft power effective? Justice institutions have become a key topic in the international scientific and institutional agendas some decades ago, for different, and still interdependent reasons: the waves of democratizations (Pridham 2000), the increasing power of the judicial branch (Russell and O Brian 2001; Stone Sweet 2002), the transnationalisation of the processes of law making and law enforcement (Allard and Garapon 2005), the increasing demand for justice, dispute resolution, and rights enforcement (Epp 1998; OECD 2014, 2015). Despite the (...) vast literature focusing on these phenomena, very little has been said on the impact that the recent development of the quality of justice mainstream (Fabri et al. 2005; Piana 2010) has on the relationship between the judicial and the executive branch. Notoriously, this relationship is one of the key dimensions for a constitutional democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis contribution seeks to develop some reflections on Marx as an analyst of the economy. I argue for a discursive Marxism that makes the integration of Foucauldian ideas into a Marxian framework possible. Three distinctive but interrelated questions will be addressed. First, what is specific about a Marxian understanding of the economy, especially compared to certain tendencies in economic sociology and political economy? Second, how is a Marxian understanding of the economy reflected by current Marxist studies and how have these (...) studies contributed to a discursive-cultural turn in Marxist and neo-Marxist analysis of the economy? Third, while the discursive-cultural turn became increasingly important, what is the contribution of discourse studies of the economy to a Marxian framework? The paper concludes with the idea of a Discursive Political Economy approach in order to grasp the cultural and institutional complexity of power. To put discursive processes into a Marxian framework, a combined analysis of discursive-imaginary as well as institutionalized-sedimented power positions is required. (shrink)

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic (...) or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin. (shrink)

La ciencia se ha convertido en cada vez más en un asunto público, lo que indudablemente requiere una monitorización de su calidad. Este artículo examina los beneficios de la evaluación de la ciencia, pero llama la atención sobre algunos de sus límites y paradojas, como la dificultad que estos procedimientos tienen para registrar lo verdaderamente nuevo, sus efectos secundarios o el hecho de que generalmente no respeten la especificidad de las ciencias humanas y sociales.

Building on conceptual insights from the history and sociology of numbers, media and surveillance studies, and theories of governance and risk, this article analyzes the forms of transparency produced by the use of numbers in social life. It examines what it is about numbers that often makes their ‘truth claims’ so powerful, investigates the role that numerical operations play in the production of retrospective, real-time and anticipatory forms of transparency in contemporary politics and economic transactions, and discusses some of the (...) implications resulting from the increasingly abstract and machine-driven use of numbers. It argues that the forms of transparency generated by machine-driven numerical operations open up for individual and collective practices in ways that are intimately linked to precautionary and pre-emptive aspirations and interventions characteristic of contemporary governance. As such, these numerical operations raise important political and ethical questions that deserve further conceptual and empirical scrutiny. (shrink)