The Metric Society

On the Quantification of the Social

Steffen Mau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509530410, 9781509530403
• eBook ISBN: 9781509530434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In today's world, numbers are in the ascendancy. Societies dominated by star ratings, scores, likes and lists are rapidly emerging, as data are collected on virtually every aspect of our lives. From annual university rankings, ratings agencies and fitness tracking technologies to our credit score and health status, everything and everybody is measured and evaluated.

In this important new book, Steffen Mau offers a critical analysis of this increasingly pervasive phenomenon. While the original intention behind the drive to quantify may have been to build trust and transparency, Mau shows how metrics have in fact become a form of social conditioning. The ubiquitous language of ranking and scoring has changed profoundly our perception of value and status. What is more, through quantification, our capacity for competition and comparison has expanded significantly – we can now measure ourselves against others in practically every area. The rise of quantification has created and strengthened social hierarchies, transforming qualitative differences into quantitative inequalities that play a decisive role in shaping the life chances of individuals.

This timely analysis of the pernicious impact of quantification will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, as well as anyone concerned by the cult of numbers and its impact on our lives and societies today.

1
The Measurement of Social Value

By ‘the quantification of the social’, I mean that we are both complicit in and witness to a trend whereby social phenomena are increasingly measured, described and influenced by numbers. Interestingly, the German word for ‘measure’ (vermessen) has three distinct meanings, each of which will play a central role in this book. The first meaning denotes an action performed in order to make a quantitative statement about an object by comparing it with an established standard (a dictionary definition gives: ‘to ascertain the precise dimensions of something’). The second meaning – and here the German language provides a telling hint – is to ‘mismeasure’, or measure incorrectly. In other words, the process used to measure the object in question (systematically) produces mistakes, and the results do not reflect reality. Thirdly, vermessen can be used in an adjectival sense to mean ‘inappropriate’ or even ‘presumptuous’, which raises the critical question of where to draw the line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ measurements.

Taken together, these three meanings provide a triangular framework within which this book proposes to consider the issue of social quantification. Its aspiration extends beyond the mechanics of measurement itself, however, as I am less concerned with measuring techniques and errors, or the calibration of measuring technologies, than with the question of how the quantification of the social leads to new forms of social organization. My starting observation is that of a rapidly growing tendency to quantify the social world, accompanied by changes in the assignment of worth which are then translated into new hierarchies. Quantified measurements institutionalize certain ‘orders of worth’ which provide us with benchmarks and justifications for viewing and evaluating things in a particular way. They tell us which activities, achievements or qualities have a high ‘value’ and which do not, thereby establishing specific normative principles (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005; Boltanski & Thévenot 2006). Through quantification, classificatory processes of definition, evaluation and categorization are imposed in which the worth status of a person or thing is expressed in numbers. The use of new indicators, data and numerical notations to identify, describe and evaluate the self is gradually transforming the social society into a metric one. Data make visible and define who we are, where we stand, how we are seen by others, and what our expectations should be.

The process of quantification is by no means a new social phenomenon. Its history dates back several millennia, to the early days of counting and the spread of mathematical knowledge. At first, the exploration of the world through numbers was the preserve of a small elite. Science, as a specific practice of rationalization, has of course shaped and developed the language of numbers from the outset. The rise of modern statehood and the expansion of markets and capitalist economics brought about a massive surge in the use of numbers in everyday economic, political and social practices. The availability of figures in the form of official statistics made possible techniques of governance which replaced the sacred with objectivity and rationality. On the markets, the spread of ‘calculative practices’ (Vormbusch 2012) – as in bookkeeping and accounting, or the standardization of measurements and conversions – led to the emergence of a particular kind of economics and trade.

In the following, I aim to show that, although the state and markets were important starting points for the expansion of calculative practices, the language of numbers has since become universalized to a degree that far transcends both these domains and that of science. A new ‘quantitative mentality’ (Porter 1996: 118) has arisen, with profound implications for our social environment. This mentality accords numbers an almost auratic pre-eminence when it comes to identifying social phenomena, and is now leading to an ever-widening reliance on all things numeric. Everything can, should or must be measured – nothing seems to be possible without numbers any more. Social semantics, in the sense of how society observes and describes itself, draws increasingly on the measurable side of the world, and of life in general. Of course, this shift is part of a long tradition of rationalization efforts aimed at organizing social and economic life according to the principles of efficiency and predictability. But that's not the whole story. In the context of new forms of governance, a regime of control and evaluation has emerged which is based on the acquisition and processing of data and whose objective is performance enhancement, capitalization and competition in very diverse domains; this regime operates via targets, performance indicators and incentive systems which require growing volumes of data to be produced and used for evaluation purposes. Qualitative methods of assessment based on specifics are being replaced by quantitative-style evaluations and measurements. To put it another way, the logic of optimization and performance enhancement which neoliberalism has imposed on every conceivable aspect of life is leading to a straightforward battle for the best figures. Moreover, the more figures are produced, and the more advanced the methods of data collection and processing become, the easier it is to embed the standards for performance and self-improvement within the social fabric. Now that data have evolved into the reserve currency of digitalized society, there are scarcely any natural boundaries left to halt this process. It is, in effect, infinite.

What does quantification mean?

First, let us consider the question of what quantification actually means, and what it does. In general terms, quantification entails an act of translation: it expresses phenomena, characteristics or states of affairs in a general, abstract and universally accessible language – that of mathematics. This can be done by measurement or by transforming qualitative judgements, insights and observations into numeric values. Quantification reduces a complex and confusing world to the standardized language of numbers, in which there are clear proportional relations between large and small (or more and less). Of course, there are different ways of talking about and understanding observed phenomena, but by assigning a number to the thing observed, we take a step towards objectivizing it. Numbers, in short, are associated with precision, one-to-one correspondence, simplification, verifiability and neutrality. As such, they are tailor-made for a prominent role in societies that regard themselves as rational and enlightened. Quantification often goes hand in hand with the existence of transparent and systematic operations for translating a social phenomenon into numbers. Key to the use of indicators or data series is that they should meet certain quality criteria and be largely independent of whoever generates them. Results are expected to be determined by processes, not people – an approach that echoes scientific practice. At the same time, the quantification of social phenomena is a process of ‘disembedding’ which deliberately strips away local knowledge and the context of social practices in order to obtain more abstract information that can be recombined and amalgamated with information from other sources.

Without the presumption that statistical data are produced in a controlled manner and not merely arbitrary, they would be of little use. All numbers deployed in public discourse require a leap of faith – they have to be accepted as correct in order to exert their cold charisma. Numbers that no-one believes in have no value in social communication. For this reason, societies go to great lengths to place self-quantification data on a secure footing, for example by introducing comprehensive legislation on statistical affairs, creating statistics authorities, participating in international data-based monitoring systems or developing standardized reporting systems in virtually every social subdomain. A country whose statistics don't add up and which makes political decisions on the basis of incorrect or inadequate data can easily fall into disrepute among both its own population and the international community, as the Greeks know all too well. Numbers are expected to be accurate – whatever that may mean.

This is not to say that numbers are free from any kind of bias: quite the contrary. Ever since numbers and indicators have featured in public and political discourse, they have also been battled over by interested parties. The GDP (Lepenies 2016), the unemployment rate, the public debt, the schwarze Null [balanced public finances] (Haffert 2016) – all these are contested key indicators, capable of triggering public anger, economic downturns, political highs or even social crises, and politicians are therefore well advised to pay close attention to them, from agreeing on suitable measuring concepts through deciding on presentation and publication frequency to discussing the political consequences of a given set of statistics. The politics of indicators works best when, in the perception of the public, the theoretical construct and the indicator are seen as one. This would be the case, for instance, if our concept of intelligence coincided exactly with the faculty measured by intelligence tests. Or if our notion of human development matched the criteria of the Human Development Index, which takes into account only life expectancy, education and per capita GDP – a woefully inadequate measure from an empirical perspective.

Numbers offer an (often very convincing) answer to our need for objectivity, relevance and rationalization. Although they abstract from concrete social contexts, they are more than mere mathematics. Underpinning them are value assignment processes that give numbers their meaning in the first place. Quantifications can thus be regarded as manifest forms of worth assignment, which is why it is not only the act of quantifying itself that matters, but how it is done and by whom. ‘Statistics’, according to Bettina Heintz, ‘claim to demonstrate a reality which exists outside of them and is rendered visible by them. In truth, however, they are not copies of a pre-existing reality, but selective constructions which are partly responsible for creating that reality. The objectivity of numbers is therefore not a fact, but an attribution’ (2010: 170).

This view of quantification leads us inevitably to consider the social processes involved in establishing the numerical medium. Unlike price signals on markets, which serve to link supply and demand, the metrics of social worth, merit or performance need to be understood primarily as social and cultural premises. All numbers contain inherent preconceptions as to what is relevant, valuable or authoritative (Espeland & Stevens 1998; Verran 2013). Data tell us how to look at things, thereby systematically excluding other perspectives. In other words, the use of numbers always represents a ‘particular form of value assignment’ (Vormbusch 2012: 24). What constitutes a good education, what efficient government means, what type of performance counts – all this is not only expressed, but socially instilled and institutionalized, by data. Numbers safeguard a particular order of worth and help anchor it in society by their very existence. As such, there is a close correlation between value estimation in the context of quantification and esteem in the sense of social recognition.

The calculative practices of the market

The notion that markets evolve spontaneously and are guided by an invisible hand is a myth which, although still accepted in certain circles of economic theory, does not stand up to close scrutiny. We have known at least since Max Weber's (1930 [1906]) famous thesis of the ‘spirit of capitalism’ that market exchange processes are cultural practices, and that they are closely linked to the emergence of specific economic systems. For Weber, the establishment of business accounting was a central premise of Western capitalism, alon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Introduction
• 1: The Measurement of Social Value
• 2: Status Competition and the Power of Numbers
• 3: Hierarchization: Rankings and Ratings
• 4: Classification: Scoring and Screening
• 5: The Evaluation Cult: Stars and Points
• 6: The Quantified Self: Charts and Graphs
• 7: The Power of Nomination
• 8: Risks and Side-Effects
• 9: Transparency and Discipline
• 10: The Inequality Regime of Quantification
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement