Without wanting to open this book with a clichĂ©, I feel compelled to admit that I once worked in a panopticon of sorts. It was a call centre. At the time, which was around the mid-to-late 1990s, it was one of the first of a new raft of call centres that were popping up in various destinations in the UK and around the world. Many organisations at the time were moving to phone-based service provision. Help lines and online customer services were the watchwords of an expanding service-based economy. Foucault, I suspect, would have had a field day. The cavernous hangar-style building had no windows (except for those located in the small dedicated âbreak-outâ areas). There was a âcentre deskâ around which the call centre was organised, with desks orbiting out from that central point. The office was open plan and the people on the centre desk were charged with monitoring and surveilling the âoperativesâ answering the phones. Those on centre desk could see everyone in the room; plus they could also see the individual operativesâ metrics in real time on the dashboards projected on their desktop monitors. At the beginning of my shift, I logged onto both the phone system and a desktop computerâtwo interconnected technologies of surveillance through which all of my daily tasks were routed. Working changeable shifts we had to âhot-deskâ. It was an environment of impermanency and mobility; desks changed, staff turned-over, calls kept flowing.
The computer system tracked our use of the front-end software designed for dealing with customer queries. Yet it was the phone system that was far more powerful in gathering the most important metrics about our labours. This system allowed the centre desk to watch what each person was doing. Each action was made visible in the metricsâwere they on the phone, were they wrapping up a previous call, were they on a break, were they in the toilet. Each of these activities was recorded by the phone system. The metrics were watched in real time, and weekly reports were also produced for performance management purposes. There were some minor forms of resistance, but the system was rigid and allowed little manoeuvre.
It is perhaps no wonder that I can now see this experience through the lens of Foucaultâs writings. This was a time spent with power operating through observational knowledgeâin which, as Foucault once put it in a lecture delivered in Rio de Janeiro, âknowledge about individualsâŠstems from the observation and classification of those individuals, from recording and analysing their actions, from their comparisonâ (Foucault 2002b: 84). How many calls, how long youâd taken on your breaks, the duration of your calls, how long you take to get to the next call, how long youâve taken in the toilet that week, and so on. These metrics were a central part of the management of the people working there. And this is before we add the extra dimension of surveillance that came with the covert listening of calls by the anonymous group of people simply referred to as âcomplianceâ. You didnât know when you were being watched, listened to, or measured.
But that was over 15 years ago and things have changed. The scale of metrics in everyday life has only amplified to a volume that couldnât have been foreseen back then. As Ronald E. Day (2014: 132) has recently observed, âno longer is surveillance of the individual enough, but now he or she is co-located within predictive matrixes of actions and objects through linked associations with other subjects, objects, and events in databases and their indexesâ. Indeed, as I hope will become clear in this book, what I will call metric power is not simply concerned with surveillanceâsurveillance is important, but metric power is not limited to the art of watching, nor can it simply be reduced to the internalisation of the feeling that we might be watched. What this call centre example illustrates, despite this amplification of metrics in recent years, is that metrics have had an ordering role in the social world for quite some time. This book keeps an eye on this history, going back beyond this short 15-year period, whilst also attempting to think about the intensifying role of metrics in various aspects of our everyday lives and the social world today. Stiglitz et al. (2010: xvii) recently surmised that in âan increasingly performance-oriented society, metrics matterâ. They matter, they argue, because âwhat we measure affects what we doâ. This is a fairly obvious conclusion perhaps, but it is one that we should nevertheless continue to concern ourselves with.
The types of ramping up of metrics that Iâm alluding to when recalling this call-centre experience has led Will Davies (2015a: 222), referring to Jeremy Bentham and the behaviourist expert John B. Watson, to conclude that:
The combination of big data, the narcissistic sharing of private feelings and thoughts, and more emotionally intelligent computers opens up possibilities for psychological tracking that Bentham and Watson could never have dreamed of. Add in smartphones and you have an extraordinary apparatus of data gathering, the like of which was previously only plausible within university laboratories or particularly high-surveillance institutions.
Thus, he powerfully infers, we are âliving in the labâ. The crucial point that we can extract from this is that the very apparatus of measurement has drastically expanded; this expansion is allied with a set of cultural changes in which the pursuit of measurement is seen to be highly desirable.
Within the vast circulating swirls of data that have become so powerful, we can see metrics as being those data that are used to provide some sort of measure of the world. In this book, I will suggest that we are created and recreated by metrics; we live through them, with them, and within them. Metrics facilitate the making and remaking of judgements about us, the judgements we make of ourselves and the consequences of those judgements as they are felt and experienced in our lives. We play with metrics and we are more often played by them. Metrics are a complex and prominent component of the social as they come to act on us and as we act according to their rules, boundaries, and limits. Metrics are a deeply woven aspect of everyday lives and the social world in which these lives are conducted. Metrics are a prominent and powerful part of the governance of contemporary life: from smartphone apps that measure our sleep and exercise, to the data produced by our transactions or social media profiles, through to the measurement of our performance at work, our health, and the financial systems of the global economy. We even have smart meters that help us to manage our household energy consumption and an emergent industry around the measurement and manipulation of something as apparently immeasurable as our emotionsâwith metrics on well-being used in attempts to maximise our output and efficiency (see Davies 2015a; Brown 2015b). An example of this kind of measurement of emotions can be found in the services offered by the-happiness-index.âcom, who provide customised assessment of happiness and well-being in order for companies to maximise their employee engagement and productivity. It would seem that metrics, as we will discover, often have a purpose: they are laced with intentions.
In short, metrics are now an embedded, multi-scalar, and active component of our everyday livesâthey are central to how those lives are ordered, governed, crafted, and defined. With all of this in mind, it could even be claimed that systems of measurement are at the heart of the very functioning of the social world as it is todayâbut perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. Metrics themselves are nothing new; these systems have a long history. Populations have been measured in various ways for a long time (see e.g. Foucault 2007). As Foucault (2013: 134) has pointed out, âwe should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantificationâŠGreek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributionsâ (this periodisation is also discussed in relation to the transformation brought on by written numerals in Kittler 2006). I will discuss this long history in detail in Chap. 2. Yet there is little doubt that these systems of measurement have escalated and intensified over recent years, especially with the rise of new data assemblages and their integration into the very fabric of our lives (see Beer 2013). As Espeland and Sauder (2007: 1) put it, âin the past two decades demands for accountability, transparency, and efficiency have prompted a flood of social measures designed to evaluate the performances of individuals and organizationâ. Newspaper accounts of extreme examples of the data-dense working environment reveal how a âstaggering array of metricsâ can be used to hold people accountable in minute detail (see the reports in Kantor and Streitfeld 2015). And then we also have major quantification-based reports such as the âGlobal Human Capital Trends 2015â report (Deloitte 2015), which the authors describe as âone of the largest longitudinal studies of talent, leadership and HR challengesâ. That particular report examines different aspects of âhuman capitalâ and provides quantifications of leadership, engagement, contingent workforce use, performance management, and so on. Alongside these quantifications, the report pushes for new approaches to quantifying âhuman capitalâ by âreinventing HRâ and taking advantage of the new âpeople dataâ and âpeople analyticsâ. The reportâs message is that the performance of people and organisations can be quantified in multiple ways, with yet plenty of new ways in which we should be furthering this quantification. The ramping up of metrics is depicted as the only sensible and desirable future. Just to pick out one phrase by way of illustration, this report informs us that âhigh potential young employees want regular feedback and career progression advice, not just âonce and doneâ reviewsâ (Deloitte 2015: 53). The push then, in this report, is towards ongoing and increasingly granular metric-based evaluations and judgements. Espeland and Sauderâs observation, which we should note was written before smartphones and social media really took hold, seems highly pertinent then. As they claim, despite this long history âwhat is relatively new is the public nature of social statisticsâ (Espeland and Sauder 2007: 4). Metrics have become embedded and so has their authority, to the point where, Espeland and Sauder (2007: 5) claim, we have âtrouble imagining other forms of coordination and discipline or other means of creating transparency and accountabilityâ. It is difficult to imagine a world that is not ordered by metrics or defined by the prominence of the desire to metricise everything.
In this context, this book will explore the social role, significance, and consequences of metrics and data. More specifically, it aims to examine the linkages between metrics and power in the contemporary setting. It is commonly suggested, not just by academics but also in the popular media, that many of the most significant technological developments of our age will centre around data and metrics. Given its potential importance and apparently increasing role, the book will look at how measurement links into power, governance, and control. In order to do this, the book will focus upon one particular set of relations: these are the relations that exist between measurement, circulation, and possibility. It is this set of connections that forms the central focus of this book. The reason that I focus upon these relations is because they allow us to see the politics of what is measured whilst also considering this in concert with the way that those measures move out into the world. It is crucial, I argue here, to understand these relations if we are to grasp the various ways in which metrics interweave into power structures. It is argued that it is in these relations that we can locate and understand what might be thought of as metric power. As such, the concept of metric power is focussed upon unravelling the power dynamics that underpin or reside within big data and other related phenomena.
Contextualising Metric Power
Before developing this central concept further, let us first reflect a little more on the context in which these relations operate. To take just one prominent example, the recently launched Apple Watch is perhaps emblematic of both our creeping connectivity and the extension of metric power into our lives. Metric power is not just about such hi-tech devices, but these provide us with a visible marker how our bodies can be directly interfaced into the infrastructures of metric harvesting. These are devices from which metrics are drawn and then used to provoke and stimulate responses. When you look at the marketing that has accompanied the launch of the Apple Watch, you actually find that this kind of bodily and nervous connectivity is a central part of how the watch is being sold (for access to the marketing materials discussed here, see Beer 2015a). We are told that it will provide a more âhapticâ experience. T...