Acting on Society: Quantification, Technologies of Performance, and Erasure of “the Social”

Abstract

This chapter analyses the use of quantification to make the wheat industry amenable to governing and, policy makers’ use of technologies of performance to make wheat export market deregulation possible. Specifically, this assemblage of technologies, including performance objectives, cost-benefit analyses, econometric modelling and audit are focused on assessing and coercing the AWB, to narrow its value and focus towards maximising growers’ returns. These technologies helped construct wheat prices as an integral mechanism for measuring and assessing the performance of statutory wheat marketing. In addition, this contributed to the construction of wheat prices and supply chain costs as the primary data for understanding value and performance of wheat export marketing, and the maximisation of wheat prices as the central ambition of wheat marketing policy. In addition, I show how policy discourses marginalise social concepts such as equity and dismiss objections to deregulation on social grounds, due to the subjectivity of the data informing these objections. Thus, policy discourses effectively erase the social world by discrediting the social, on the one hand and, portraying markets and information produced in markets as the legitimate reality which should be considered in policy making.