Numerical operations, transparency illusions and the datafication of governance

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.

[1]  H. Hansen,et al.  What Do Numbers Do in Transnational Governance , 2012 .

[2]  J. Roberts.  Poststructuralism against poststructuralism: Actor-network theory, organizations and economic markets , 2012 .

[3]  Roger Brownsword.  Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing , 2011 .

[4]  Joachim Gassen,et al.  Accounting, Organizations and Society , 2013 .

[5]  Samuel Randalls,et al.  Precaution, Preemption: Arts and Technologies of the Actionable Future , 2009 .

[6]  B. Anderson,et al.  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism , 1986 .

[7]  Keith Robson,et al.  ACCOUNTING NUMBERS AS 'INSCRIPTION': ACTION AT A DISTANCE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACCOUNTING. , 1992 .

[8]  R. Ericson,et al.  The surveillant assemblage. , 2000, The British journal of sociology.

[9]  G. Kendall.  Global Networks, International Networks, Actor Networks , 2004 .

[10]  Charles Anderson,et al.  The end of theory: The data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete , 2008 .

[11]  B. Hindess.  Discourses of Power: From Hobbes to Foucault , 1996 .

[12]  John Roberts,et al.  No-one is perfect: the limits of transparency and an ethic for ‘intelligent’ accountability , 2009 .

[13]  Olha Buchel,et al.  Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think , 2015 .

[14]  S. R. Jammalamadaka,et al.  Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk , 1999 .

[15]  Peter Miller.  Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter , 2008 .

[16]  D. Dennis,et al.  Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed , 1998 .

[17]  Yves Gendron,et al.  Beyond panopticism: On the ramifications of surveillance in a contemporary professional setting , 2011 .

[18]  Ian Hacking,et al.  Kinds of People: Moving Targets , 2007 .

[19]  Neil M. Richards,et al.  Three Paradoxes of Big Data , 2015 .

[20]  Wendy Larner,et al.  Calculating the Social , 2010 .

[21]  I. Bruno,et al.  Statactivism: forms of action between disclosure and affirmation , 2014 .

[22]  D. Lyon.  Surveillance Studies: An Overview , 2007 .

[23]  Eric Gossett,et al.  Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think , 2015 .

[24]  A. Giddens.  The Nation-State and Violence , 1986 .

[25]  K. Hoskin,et al.  Writing, examining, disciplining: the genesis of accounting's modern power , 1994 .

[26]  H. Hansen.  Managing corruption risks , 2011 .

[27]  J. Teugels.  The Politics of Large Numbers: a History of Statistical Reasoning , 2003 .

[28]  Andrea Coulson,et al.  Organized uncertainty: designing a world of risk management , 2008 .

[29]  David Garland,et al.  3. The Rise of Risk , 2003 .

[30]  W. Larner.  Global Benchmarking: Participating at a Distance in the Global Economy , 2004 .

[31]  R. D'amico.  Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , 1978, Telos.

[32]  Charles P. Oman,et al.  Uses and abuses of governance indicators , 2006 .

[33]  M. Goede,et al.  Risk and the War on Terror , 2008 .

[34]  Ronald J. Waldman,et al.  Sex, drugs, and body counts: The politics of numbers in global crime and conflict , 2012 .

[35]  Nelli Piattoeva,et al.  Elastic numbers: national examinations data as a technology of government , 2015, Governing by Numbers.

[36]  Louise Amoore,et al.  Data Derivatives , 2011 .

[37]  Wendy Nelson Espeland,et al.  The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change , 2009 .

[38]  Michael B. Usher,et al.  Science in action , 1993, Nature.

[39]  Mireille Hildebrandt,et al.  Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing - The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology , 2013, Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing.

[40]  N. Rose.  Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought , 1999 .

[41]  Mitchell L. Stevens,et al.  A Sociology of Quantification* , 2008, European Journal of Sociology.

[42]  R. Matthews.  Governing the Present , 2014 .

[43]  Ronald J. Deibert.  Parchment, printing, and hypermedia : communication in world order transformation , 1997 .

[44]  Nikolas Rose,et al.  Powers of Freedom: Contents , 1999 .

[45]  Donald E. Polkinghorne,et al.  Changing conversations about human science. , 1986 .

[46]  G. Gumpert,et al.  Through the looking glass: illusions of transparency and the cult of information , 2007 .

[47]  Hendrik Vollmer,et al.  How to do more with numbers: Elementary stakes, framing, keying, and the three-dimensional character of numerical signs , 2007 .

[48]  Oded Löwenheim.  Examining the State: a Foucauldian perspective on international ‘governance indicators’ , 2008 .

[49]  Tonia Carless,et al.  A New Visibility , 2011 .

[50]  Martha Lampland,et al.  Calculating the Social: Standards and the Reconfiguration of Governing , 2012 .

[51]  Erik Brynjolfsson,et al.  Big data: the management revolution. , 2012, Harvard business review.

[52]  M. Power.  Counting, Control and Calculation: Reflections on Measuring and Management , 2004 .

[53]  Patrick Bolton,et al.  WORKING PAPER SERIES THE CREDIT RATINGS GAME , 2011 .

[54]  J. Overhage,et al.  Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences , 2001, Annals of Internal Medicine.

[55]  David Lyon.  2. 9/11, Synopticon, and Scopophilia: Watching and Being Watched , 2005 .

[56]  Mireille Hildebrandt,et al.  Who Needs Stories if You Can Get the Data? ISPs in the Era of Big Number Crunching , 2011 .

[57]  T. Mathiesen,et al.  The Viewer Society , 1997 .

[58]  Andrea Mubi Brighenti,et al.  Visibility A Category for the Social Sciences , 2007 .

[59]  Michael T. Turvey,et al.  The ecological approach to perception , 2002 .

[60]  R. Ericson,et al.  The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility , 2006 .

[61]  R. Filho,et al.  Security, territory, population (Lectures at the College de France) , 2011 .

[62]  B. Anderson.  Preemption, precaution, preparedness: Anticipatory action and future geographies , 2010 .

[63]  Mahmoud Ezzamel,et al.  Order and accounting as a performative ritual: Evidence from ancient Egypt , 2009 .

[64]  W. Larner,et al.  Global Governmentality : Governing International Spaces , 2004 .

[65]  Ariane Ellerbrok,et al.  Empowerment: Analyzing Technologies of Multiple Variable Visibility , 2010 .

[66]  Claudia Aradau,et al.  Governing Terrorism Through Risk: Taking Precautions, (un)Knowing the Future , 2007 .

[67]  Kerstin Martens.  How to Become an Influential Actor — The ‘Comparative Turn’ in OECD Education Policy , 2007 .

[68]  D. MacKenzie.  Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets , 2006, Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

[69]  A. Desrosières.  Statistics and social critique , 2014 .

[70]  Ian Kerr Jessica Earle,et al.  Prediction, Preemption, Presumption: How Big Data Threatens Big Picture Privacy , 2013 .

[71]  Pablo J. Boczkowski,et al.  The Relevance of Algorithms , 2013 .

[72]  Henrik Enroth.  Governance The art of governing after governmentality , 2014 .

[73]  Tore Fougner,et al.  Neoliberal Governance of States: The Role of Competitiveness Indexing and Country Benchmarking , 2008 .

[74]  Brian Rotman,et al.  Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero , 1987 .

[75]  H. Hansen.  The power of performance indices in the global politics of anti-corruption , 2012 .

[76]  Tero Erkkilä,et al.  (De)politicizing good governance: the World Bank Institute, the OECD and the politics of governance indicators , 2014 .

[77]  Antoinette Rouvroy,et al.  Technology, virtuality and utopia: governmentality in an age of autonomic computing , 2011, Law, Human Agency and Autonomic Computing.

[78]  Brian Rotman,et al.  Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting , 2000 .

[79]  W. Espeland,et al.  Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds1 , 2007, American Journal of Sociology.

[80]  John Law,et al.  Notes on the theory of the actor-network: Ordering, strategy, and heterogeneity , 1992 .

[81]  I. Hutchby.  Technologies, Texts and Affordances , 2001 .

[82]  Mikkel Flyverbom,et al.  The politics of transparency and the calibration of knowledge in the digital age , 2015 .

[83]  A. Spicer,et al.  Is Actor Network Theory Critique? , 2008 .

[84]  Hille Koskela,et al.  ‘You shouldn’t wear that body’: the problematic of surveillance and gender , 2012 .

[85]  D. Boyd,et al.  CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA , 2012 .

[86]  Mark Andrejevic.  Surveillance in the Big Data Era , 2014 .

[87]  Celia Lury,et al.  Number ecologies: numbers and numbering practices , 2014 .

[88]  T. Porter.  Making serious measures: numerical indices, peer review, and transnational actor-networks , 2012 .

[89]  C. Montelle.  The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics , 2013 .

[90]  Mark B. Salter,et al.  Imagining Numbers: Risk, Quantification, and Aviation Security , 2008 .