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Redden, Guy (2020)Distinktion, Online first, pp. 1-17.ABSTRACTThe proximate roots of performance measurement lie in a 1980s shift in management accountancy away from lagging and financial indicators towards leading ones that indicate potential for future value creation, especially regarding intangible assets and functions. This paper proposes that such innovations in accountancy are not merely technical but are driven by contextual economic imperatives. It shows how PM articulates with capital owner demand for maximal value creation under the shareholder value model of the corporation rationalized through neoliberal economic thought and new economy discourses. Performance metrics cascade through organizational levels so as to highlight the apparent contributions of actors held accountable for aspects of value creation. They allow a subtle shift away from Taylorist operational statistics based on demonstrated achievable values towards prospective calculative rationality that enjoins all to manage their own capacity to increase value amid expectations of continuous improvement. Quantifying labour by putative performance outputs also allows for differential levels of reward and the marketization of wage relations favoured by agency theory. It has been central to new ways of eliciting more output for less reward from gig economy and neotaylorist workers, while also enabling the emergence of the equity-owning ‘superstar manager class’ that Piketty sees as distinctive of contemporary inequality. Its members largely configure and benefit from performance-related pay frameworks that reward executives for minimizing costs relative to ‘maximizing’ of the value chains they oversee.EXTRACT“Quantification is contestable from an epistemological viewpoint concerned about the reliability of the kind of knowledge it produces (Redden 2015), and by extension this means we must question the role of related ‘technical mechanisms for making judgements, prioritizing problems and allocating scarce resources’ in public life (Rose 1991, 673). However, the largely simplistic statistical form of metrics may also be crucial to what they do in and with social situations in general terms. Above all they score items. For instance, credit scores rate the worthiness of persons in relation to debt products (Fourcade and Healy 2013) and college rankings render complex factors seen to constitute quality of education into a score for each institution aimed at prospective students (Espeland and Sauder 2016). In each case the simplification via quantification is inherent to a market setting in which actors using metrics have an interest in differentiating between the values of items. They thus need numeric values that are clear enough to allow differentiations to happen regardless of complexities that may be occluded.This is also to say their use to achieve valuation is another common characteristic of the kinds of measurement practices that have been in the ascendant in recent years (Adkins and Lury 2011). As Muniesa (2011) argues, valuation is a pragmatic process. Values created are contingent upon the methods adopted amid given social relations where agents with particular aims evaluate particular things for specific reasons. While measurement relies upon and helps to form categories (such as population groups like the poor or sick noted by Hacking), metric scales also have another basic property. They have ‘built-in valuation’ because ‘the represented information enables an immediate evaluation in terms of “more” and “less”’ (Diaz-Bone 2016, 54). Here we see how the apparently objective counting of properties can take on a moral character when the phenomena counted are considered more or less desirable qualities of the lifeworld. As Mau puts it, ‘objects with the same score are deemed equally good’ but ‘those with different scores can be arranged in order of “better or worse”’. And this is precisely the point in many practices of social evaluation that centre upon metrics. Espeland and Sauder (2016) capture in painstaking detail how very few academics believe that the moral categories of good and bad colleges produced by law school rankings are based on much more than assumptions, pragmatic choices and questionable data in the process of compiling indicators that combine into final composite indexes. Such examples may frustrate anyone who believes the representation to be unfair and it may ‘foreclose other modes of creating and expressing value’ (200), but it thereby signifies how quantification powerfully converges with social practices of valuation, potentially trumping alternatives.In this regard the French economics of convention school has provided influential lines of thought for the theorization of metrics (Fourcade and Healy 2017). It stresses that dominant institutional practices of valuation allow the construction of ‘orders of worth’, and they include methods of quantification that ‘test’ values and provide apparent evidence to justify particular rationalizations for the allocation of social goods (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). In these terms stratification of values created by metrics may be considered means through which unequal social fields are legitimated, constructed and managed. In a series of articles, Fourcade and Healy (2013, 2016, 2017) show how metrics sort and classify in ways that affect the life chances of those with whom measured characteristics are associated. Measures such as credit scores not only result in different kinds of access to goods such as financial products, they are predicated on the differentiation between values as a basis for economic action. This allows ‘a new regime of moralized social classification, backed by algorithmic techniques and dependent on large volumes of quantitative data’ (2016, 10) that help form categories of persons in relation to socio-economic situations. In other words, at least insofar as they are shaped by pecuniary interests, metrics can create class-like effects of stratified access to goods and recognition and even convey kinds of capital represented by scores. In this metrics help generate distinctive ‘classification situations’ when different levels of cardinal scores are segmented into classes that can be placed in ordinal ranks on scales of value with regard to given sets of relations – and such classifications shape the social power of actors.” (p. 3-4)