Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Possibility

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Metric Power

  • 1032 Accesses

Abstract

Following the exploration of the circulation of metrics in the previous chapters, this chapter focusses upon the way that these circulating metrics define what is possible and what is seen to be possible. The argument of this chapter is that it is by defining possibility that metric power becomes embodied and instantiated. The chapter explores the relations between metrics and possibility on four fronts. First, it looks at the role of metrics in defining inequality. Second, it looks at the roles of metrics in defining what is seen to be of value or worthwhile. Third, it explores the role of metrics in defining what is visible or invisible. And, fourth, it discusses the ways in which metrics are used to imagine futures through visions of possibility (rather than just probability). The chapter concludes by suggesting that these four fronts are crucial in understanding how circulating metrics become active in the performance of the social world and its limits.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 89.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Adkins, L. (2009). Feminism after measure. Feminist Theory, 10(3), 323–339.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Adkins, L., & Lury, C. (2012). Introduction: Special measures. In L. Adkins & C. Lury (Eds.), Measure and value (pp. 5–23). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amoore, L. (2013). The politics of possibility: Risk and security beyond possibility. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Atkinson, R., & Burrows, R. (2014). A city in thrall to capital? London, money-power and elites. Discover Society, 15. Accessed July 6, 2015, from http://discoversociety.org/2014/12/01/a-city-in-thrall-to-capital-london-money-power-and-elites/

  • Badiou, A. (2008). Number and numbers. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Z. (2011). Collateral damage: Social inequalities in a global age. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beer, D. (2013). Popular culture and new media: The politics of circulation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Beer, D. (2015b). Productive measures: Culture and measurement in the context of everyday neoliberalism. Big Data and Society, 2(1), 1–12.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bennett, T., Savage, M., Silva, E. B., Warde, A., Gayo-Cal, M., & Wright, D. (2009). Culture, class, distinction. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown, W. (2015b). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. New York: Zone Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Burchill, C. (2011). Introduction to ‘secrecy and transparency’: The politics of opacity and openness. Theory Culture and Society, 28(7–8), 7–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Crossley, N. (2009). The man whose web expanded: Network dynamics in Manchester’s post/punk music scene 1976–1980. Poetics, 37(1), 24–49.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Davies, W. (2014). The limits of neoliberalism. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davies, W. (2015a). The happiness industry: How the government and big business sold us well-being. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Day, R. E. (2014). Indexing it all: The subject in the age of documentation, information, and data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dodd, N. (2014). Piketty symposium. British Journal of Sociology, 65(4), 589–747.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doria, L. (2013). Calculating the human: Universal calculability in the age of quality assurance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Elden, S. (2006). Speaking against number: Heidegger, language and the politics of calculation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Espeland, W. N. (1997). Authority by the numbers: Porter on quantification, discretion, and the legitimation of expertise. Law and Social Inquiry, 22(4), 1107–1133.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Espeland, W. N., & Sauder, M. (2007). Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1), 1–40.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology, 49(3), 401–436.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gane, N. (2005). Radical post-humanism: Friedrich Kittler and the primacy of technology. Theory Culture and Society, 22(3), 25–41.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gordon, C. (1991). Governmental rationality: An introduction. In G. Burchill, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 1–51). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hacking, I. (1990). The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking, I. (1991). How should we do the history of statistics? In G. Burchill, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect (pp. 181–195). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Halpern, O. (2014). Beautiful data: A history of vision and reason since 1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hearn, A. (2008). ‘Meat, mask, burden’: Probing the contours of the branded ‘self’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 8(2), 197–217.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hearn, A. (2010). Structuring feeling: Web 2.0, online ranking and rating, and the digital ‘reputation’ economy. Ephemera, 10(3–4), 421–438.

    Google Scholar 

  • Higgins, V., & Larner, W. (2010a). Standards and standardization as a social scientific problem. In V. Higgins & W. Larner (Eds.), Calculating the social: Standards and the reconfiguration of governing (pp. 1–18). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Higgins, V., & Larner, W. (2010b). From standardization to standardizing work. In V. Higgins & W. Larner (Eds.), Calculating the social: Standards and the reconfiguration of governing (pp. 205–218). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Kennedy, H. & Moss, G. (2015). Known or knowing publics? Social media data mining and the question of public agency. Big Data and Society, 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2053951715611145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kitchin, R. (2014a). The data revolution: Big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. London: Sage.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kittler, F. (1999). Gramophone, film, typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Konings, M. (2015). The emotional logic of capitalism: What progressives have missed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lemke, T. (2011). Bio-politics: An advanced introduction. New York: New York University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacKenzie, D. (2015, May 21). On ‘Spoofing’. London Review of Books, p. 38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mair, M., Greiffenhagen, C., & Sharrock, W. (2015). Statistical practice: Putting society on display. Theory, Culture and Society. Online first. doi: 10.1177/0263276414559058.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mckenzie, L. (2015). Getting by: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. Bristol: Policy Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, P., & Rose, N. (2008). Governing the present. Cambridge: Polity Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moor, L., & Lury, C. (2011). Making and measuring value: Comparison, singularity and agency in brand valuation practice. Journal of Cultural Economy, 4(4), 439–454.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Naughton, J. (2015, August 16). Why its full speed ahead to being ruled by computers. The Guardian. Accessed August 19, 2015, from http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/16/full-speed-ahead-being-ruled-by-computers

  • Oksala, J. (2013). Feminism and neoliberal governmentality. Foucault Studies, 16(1), 32–53.

    Google Scholar 

  • Osuri, G. (2009). Necropolitical complicities: (Re)constructing a normative somatechnics of Iraq. Social Semiotics, 19(1), 31–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pasquale, F. (2015). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Peck, J. (2012). Austerity urbanism: American cities under extreme economy. CITY, 16(6), 626–655.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twent-first century. New York: Harvard University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Porter, T. M. (1995). Trust in numbers: The pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pugliese, J. (2010). Biometrics: Bodies, technologies, biopolitics. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pugliese, J., & Stryker, S. (2009). The somatechnics of race and whiteness. Social Semiotics, 19(1), 1–8.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roy, A. (2014). Capitalism: A ghost story. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruppert, E. (2015). Doing the transparent state: Open government data as performance indicators. In R. Rottenburg, S. E. Merry, S. J. Park, & J. Mugler (Eds.), The world of indicators: The making of governmental knowledge through quantification (pp. 127–150). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Savage, M. (2013). The ‘Social life of methods’: A critical introduction. Theory Culture and Society, 30(4), 3–21.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Savage, M. (2015). Social Class in the 21st Century. London: Pelican Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scharff, C. (2014). Gender and neoliberalism: Exploring the exclusions and contours of neoliberal subjectivities. Theory, Culture and Society. Accessed August 20, 2015, from http://theoryculturesociety.org/christina-scharff-on-gender-and-neoliberalism/

  • Schinkel, W. (2013). The imagination of ‘society’ in measurements of immigrant integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36(7), 1142–1161.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skeggs, B. (2005). The making of class and gender through visualizing moral subject formation. Sociology, 39(5), 965–982.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skeggs, B. (2014). Values beyond value? Is anything beyond the logic of capital? The British Journal of Sociology, 65(1), 1–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Skeggs, B., & Yuill S. (2015). Capital experimentation with person/a formation: How Facebook’s monetization refigures the relationship between property, personhood and protest. Information, Communicaton and Society. Online first. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2015.1111403.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sociological Review. (2015). Sociologies of class: Elites (GBCS) and critiques. Sociological Review, 63(2), 205–549.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tyler, I. (2013). Revolting subjects: Social abjection resistance in neoliberal Britain. London: Zed Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tyler, I. (2015). Classificatory struggles: Class, culture and inequality in neoliberal times. The Sociological Review, 63(2), 493–511.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tyler, I., & Bennett, B. (2010). ‘Celebrity chav’: Fame, femininity and social class. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(3), 375–393.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Venn, C. (2009). Neoliberal political economy, biopolitics and colonialism: A transcolonial genealogy of inequality. Theory Culture and Society, 26(6), 206–233.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • White, M. D. (2014). The illusion of well-being: Economic policymaking based on respect and responsiveness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of York, York, UK

    David Beer

Authors
  1. David Beer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Beer, D. (2016). Possibility. In: Metric Power. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55649-3_4

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55649-3_4

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55648-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-55649-3

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation