Abstract
There is a pervasive sense in which we seem to be living under a new avalanche of numbers, and in particular an avalanche of indicators beyond the state and purporting to create knowledge on a global scale. As much as our indicator culture engenders a “faith in numbers”, the very expansion of the power of numbers and their role in (global) governance over the last 20 years has brought with it a heightened sense that quantification, indicators, and rankings are a way of doing politics that must be engaged with from within and without the specific disciplinary knowledge (such as statistics and econometrics) that underwrite their claims to objectivity. The chapters collected in this Handbook aim to capture the contemporary indicator culture, with all its discordant and contrasting orientations. The present introductory chapter considers three main dimensions. First, no chapter in the Handbook adopts a naively metrological understanding of indicators as simply “measuring” reality. Second, the normativity of measurement is a consistent theme of the contributions by both scholars and practitioners. Third, despite their popularity and seeming capacity to shape debates, the power of indicators remains highly contextual and dependent on how they are enrolled in particular, situated, networks of actors and influence.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Poovey notes that “liberal governmentality” depended on self-rule rather than rule by coercion. Administering self-rule in a market society “involved understanding human motivations ... [and] as a consequence, the knowledge that increasingly seemed essential to liberal governmentality was the kind cultivated by moral philosophers”.
- 2.
For example, the now accepted notion of “national income” comparable across vastly different territories and peoples was once considered by economists to be an implausible object of measurement, susceptible to too many problems of data and conceptual validity to be tractable. As a result, the meaning of the numbers was closely contested, and the many judgements involved in quantifying national income were highly controversial until the matter became “settled” through its regular production and use in policy discussion—despite no real answer being provided to the scientific doubts about the numbers.
- 3.
Desrosières refers to this as “accounting realism”. Those without detailed knowledge of the way in which the number is made could easily slip into metrological realism—mistaking the number as a measure of a real thing in the world.
- 4.
Broome and Quirk refer to “global benchmarking” as “an umbrella term for a wide range of comparative evaluation techniques that systematically assess the performance of actors, populations, or institutions. This can include techniques such as audits, rankings, indicators, indexes, baselines, and targets, all of which work on the basis of standardised measurements, metrics and rankings” (p. 815). They go on to argue that “global benchmarking efforts almost invariably draw upon a common portfolio of normative values, assumptions, and agendas, such as liberal or neoliberal models of the rule of law, freedom of speech, democracy, human development, environmental protection, poverty alleviation, ‘modern’ statehood, and ‘free’ markets” (p. 829).
- 5.
The sources of this authority could be the power of the state producing the indicator (such as in the case of the United States’ Trafficking in Persons’ “Tier”-based ratings) or its incorporation into a form of conditionality, such as the United States’ Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which uses certain third party-generated composite indices as benchmarks to evaluate whether a state is eligible for some kinds of development funding.
- 6.
“[Q]uantifying social phenomena requires translating things understood in idiosyncratic, systemic, or situational terms into things that can be counted. In making them commensurable, they must be viewed as, in some ways, the same, pulled away from their embeddedness in a holistic cultural and political context. Some features must be considered; others must be ignored.”
- 7.
The term “neo-liberal” has diverse meanings and connotations and may not denote exactly the same thing in its various uses. Here, we use it to refer to the political and economic policy agenda that gained strength in the late 1970s, which insisted on the rationalisation of public expenditures, the reduction of state regulation of economic activity, and the expansion of market dynamics in decisions concerning the allocation of public and private resources.
References
Akech, M. (2015). Evaluating the Impact of Corruption Indicators on Governance Discourses in Kenya. In S. E. Merry, K. E. Davis, & B. Kingsbury (Eds.), The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law (pp. 248–283). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bhuta, N. (2012). Governmentalizing Sovereignty: Indexes of State Fragility and the Calculability of Political Order. In K. Davis, A. Fisher, B. Kingsbury, & S. E. Merry (Eds.), Governance by Indicators: Global Power through Quantifications and Rankings (pp. 132–164). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowker, G. C., & Leigh Star, S. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bradley, C. (2015). International Organizations and the Production of Indicators: The Case of Freedom House. In S. E. Merry, K. E. Davis, & B. Kingsbury (Eds.), The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law (pp. 27–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Broome, A., & Quirk, J. (2015a). The Politics of Numbers: The Normative Agendas of Global Benchmarking. Review of International Studies, 41(5), 813–818.
Broome, A., & Quirk, J. (2015b). Governing the World at a Distance: The Practice of Global Benchmarking. Review of International Studies, 41(5), 819–841.
Bulmer, S., & Padgett, S. (2004). Policy Transfer in the European Union: An Institutionalist Perspective. British Journal of Political Science, 35(1), 103–126.
Bukovansky, M. (2015). Corruption Rankings: Constructing and Contesting the Global Anti-Corruption Agenda. In Cooley and Snyder 2015 (pp. 60–84).
de Burca, G. (2010). New Governance and Experimentalism: An Introduction. Wisconsin Law Review, 2, 227–238.
de Burca, G., Keohane, R., & Sabel, C. (2014). Global Experimentalist Governance. British Journal of Political Science, 44(3), 477–486.
Collier, S. (2012). Neo-liberalism as Big Leviathan or …? A Response to Wacquant and Hilgers. Social Anthropology, 20(2), 186–195.
Cooley, A. (2015). The Emerging Politics of International Rankings and Ratings: A Framework for Analysis. In A. Cooley & J. Snyder (Eds.), Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (pp. 1–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cooley, A., & Snyder, J. (Eds.). (2015). Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davis, K. E., Kingsbury, B., & Merry, S. E. (2012). Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance. Law and Society Review, 46(1), 71–104.
Desrosières, A. (1998). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Desrosières, A. (2001). How Real Is Statistics? Four Possible Attitudes. Social Research, 68(2), 339–355.
Desrosières, A. (2015). Retroaction: How Indicators Feed Back onto Quantified Actors. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification (pp. 329–353). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dutta, N. K. (2015). Tradeoffs in Accountability: Conditionality Processes in the European Union and Millennium Challenge Corporation. In S. E. Merry, K. E. Davis, & B. Kingsbury (Eds.), The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law (pp. 156–196). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Espeland, W. (2015). Narrating Numbers. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification (pp. 56–75). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Espeland, W., & Stevens, M. L. (1998). Commensuration as a Social Process. American Journal of Sociology, 24(1), 313–343.
Espeland, W., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A Sociology of Quantification. European Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 401–436.
Fioramonti, L. (2014). How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics. London/New York: Zed Books Ltd..
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fukuda Parr, S. (2003). The Human Development Paradigm: Operationalizing Sen’s Ideas on Capabilities. Feminist Economics, 9(2–3), 301–317.
Hacking, I. (1982). Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers. Humanities in Society, 5, 279–295.
Hacking, I. (1990). The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. (2002). Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hurrell, A. (2007). On Global Order: Power, Values and the Constitution of International Society. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kelley, J. G. (2017). Scorecard Diplomacy: Grading States to Influence their Reputation and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kelley, J. G., & Simmons, B. A. (2014). The Power of Performance Indicators: Rankings, Ratings and Reactivity in International Relations (American Political Science Association Annual Meeting Paper). Washington, DC: American Political Science Association. Retrieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=2451319.
Knill, C. (2005). Introduction: Cross-national Policy Convergence: Concepts, Approaches and Explanatory Factors. Journal of European Public Policy, 12(5), 764–774.
Lindenfeld, D. (1997). The Practical Imagination: The German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Merry, S. E. (2016). The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence and Sex Trafficking. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Merry, S. E., & Wood, S. (2015). Quantification and the Paradox of Measurement: Translating Children’s Rights in Tanzania. Current Anthropology., 56(2), 205–217.
Merry, S. E., Davis, K. E., & Kingsbury, B. (Eds.). (2015). The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Poovey, M. (1998). A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Porter, T. (1995). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Porter, T. (2015). The Flight of the Indicator. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification (pp. 34–55). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Power, M. (1997). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Roberts, A. (2010). The Logic of Discipline: Global Capitalism and the Architecture of Government. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rottenburg, R., Merry, S. E., Park, S. J., & Mugler, J. (Eds.). (2015). The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sassen, S. (2007). A Sociology of Globalization. New York: WW Norton.
Schueth, S. (2015). Winning the Rankings Game: The Republic of Georgia, USAID and the Doing Business Project. In A. Cooley & J. Snyder (Eds.), Ranking the World: Grading States as a Tool of Global Governance (pp. 151–177). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Serban, M. (2015). Rule of Law Indicators as a Technology of Power in Romania. In S. E. Merry, K. E. Davis, & B. Kingsbury (Eds.), The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law (pp. 199–221). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Speich, D. (2011). The Use of Global Abstractions: National Income Accounting in the Period of Imperial Decline. Journal of Global History, 6(1), 7–28.
Strathern, M. (Ed.). (2000). Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy. London: Routledge.
Tribe, K. (1995). Strategies of Economic Order: German Economic Discourse, 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Umbach, G. (2009). Intent and Reality of the European Employment Strategy: Europeanisation of National Employment Policies and Policy-making? Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Umbach, G. (2017). Measuring (Global) Governance—The Potential, the Practical and the Problematic Assessment of Governance Within and Beyond the State. In A. Triandafyllidou (Ed.), Global Governance from Regional Cultural Perspectives: A Critical View (pp. 45–69). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Urueña, R. (2015). Indicators and the Rule of Law: A Case Study of the Rule of Law Index. In S. E. Merry, K. E. Davis, & B. Kingsbury (Eds.), The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law (pp. 75–102). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Voß, J. P., & Freeman, R. (2016). Introduction: Knowing Governance. In J. P. Voß & R. Freeman (Eds.), Knowing Governance: The Epistemic Construction of Political Order (pp. 1–33). Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization. (2004). A Fair Globalization: Creating Opportunities for All. Geneva: International Labour Organization. Retrieved from http://www.ilo.org/public/english/wcsdg/docs/report.pdf.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bhuta, N., Malito, D.V., Umbach, G. (2018). Introduction: Of Numbers and Narratives—Indicators in Global Governance and the Rise of a Reflexive Indicator Culture. In: Malito, D., Umbach, G., Bhuta, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62706-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62707-6
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)