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Ismael Rafols &#38; Andy Stirling (2020)PreprintIntroduction. “Over recent decades, indicators have become increasingly prominent in governance across a variety of sectors. Through most of the 20th century, indicators were used as tools to inform, support and justify decision-making. The advent of neoliberal governance and New Public Management (NPM) in the 1980s brought about increased use of scalar quantification. By this, we mean that issues of interest are not just represented quantitatively, but as single (notionally definitive) numbers. Thus in both private and public spheres, NPM’ aims to help ensure greater adoption of ‘best’ choices (i.e. more productive, more efficient, higher performance) (Desrosières, 2015). This overall increase is associated with greater use of indicators in micro-management of organisations and staff, underpinning more explicit incentive mechanisms for fostering self-monitoring, self-auditing and external control towards improved ‘performance’ (Rottenburg and Merry, 2015, pp. 3-7; Dahler-Larsen, 2011). The internet and growing computational capacity further fuelled these changes through ‘metrics’ developed from big data analytics.” (p. 1)Download link