Previous research on reactivity—defined as changing organizational behaviour to better conform to the criteria of measurement in response to being measured—has found significant variation in company responses toward sustainability metrics. We propose that reactivity is driven by dialogue, motivation, and capacity in a configurational way. Empirically, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to analyze company responses to the sustainability index FTSE4Good. We find evidence of complementary and substitute effects between motivation and capacity. Based on these effects, we develop a (...) typology of reactivity to sustainability metrics, which also theorizes the use of metrics as tools for performance feedback and the building of calculative capacity. We show that when reactivity is studied configurationally, we can identify previously underacknowledged types of responses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for studying and using sustainability metrics as governance tools for responsible behaviour. (shrink)

Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social life, however, there is a pressing need to understand the ethical stakes of quantification. The current study examines quantification from an ethical lens, to frame and promote a research agenda around the ethics of quantification. After a brief overview (...) of quantification research and its uses in state and market organization, I discuss quantification in terms of three core subprocesses—capture, specification, and appropriation, illustrating and identifying ethical concerns around each process. Linking these processes to the performative effects of measures, I present a working model of quantification from which the discussion builds ideas for developing a research agenda around quantification. (shrink)

While numerous studies have shown diverse effects of rankings, rather little is known about their production. This article contributes to a broader understanding of rankings in society, and does so by focusing on underlying worldviews. I argue that the existence of a ranking and its concrete methodology can be explained by the producer’s paradigmatic assumptions about a world-to-be-ranked. Referring to the sociology of knowledge and studies on commensuration, comparisons, quantification and valuation, I provide a general heuristic to analyze this relation (...) between underlying worldviews and observational regimes through which order is constructed systematically. Presenting empirical results on a ranking for the most famous artists in the world, I show how the review device’s initial problem and its construction of order derive from consistent assumptions about contemporary art, its symbolic structures and its social embeddedness. These findings have implications for both research on rankings and sociology of the arts. (shrink)