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AbstractThis essay revisits the question of mass destruction through the perspectives offered by postcolonial thinkers.

From the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, the number of people locked in U.S. prisons and jails, and forced onto parole or probation, increased from less than eight hundred thousand to more than seven million. From the beginning, this explosive growth, known commonly as mass incarceration, has been about containing, stigmatizing, and exploiting the poorest sectors of the working class. While an important prison reform movement has been underway for many years, private forces have attempted to co-opt this movement and have implemented and profited from alternative forms of mass coercion proliferating throughout society.

"Gdzie jest wiedza, którą utraciliśmy w wiadomościach?" – pyta abp Józef Michalik, cytując Eliota. I jest to ważne pytanie. Człowiek ma w sobie głębię, którą zaspokoić może tylko Bóg. "Trzeba pracować dla odzyskania głębi – tej głębi, która właściwa jest ludzkiej istocie. Tej głębi, która wzywa jego umysł i serce […]. Jest to właśnie głębia prawdy i wolności, sprawiedliwości i miłości. Głębia pokoju" (Jana Paweł II).

The topic of this scientific work is social masses and the mass society. The subject of research will be reduced to the definition of the notions of "social mass" and "mass society" and finding similarities and differences between them. The author starts from the initial assumption that social masses and mass societies are two similar, but also quite different notions. The following methods were used in the paper: observation, content analysis, developmental method, structural approach, comparative method, analytical approach etc. The scientific justification of the research derives from the establishment of similarities and differences between these two notions, which makes a significant contribution to the construction of the Sociology of the Masses as one of the scientific disciplines of Sociology. The social reach of the research is founded on questioning social masses and the power of the impact of the mass society on contemporary social trends.

This article compares a variety of modes of quantifying individuals to govern them. The analytical grid issues from a former research program on the Politics of Statistics that focused on one of these modes of governing by numbers, the statistical nation state, which is here included in an array of more recently developed governing numbers based on benchmarking, digital tracking, or self-quantifying. Three main operations differentiate modes of governing by numbers: measuring individuals for quantification, taking political measures accordingly to guide their behaviors, and an intermediate operation that is often less visible although situated between the two previous ones and needed to link them: evaluating the situation through a measured judgment that justifies the monitoring based on numbers. This analysis breaks down data into the sequential steps of the transformations chain of information formats needed to pass from an individual person to a governing figure. The plurality of modes of evaluation, and its reduction by quantification, is given high significance, as well as the way each mode of governing affects individuals, their identity and their possibility to critically reflect and question.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to review the issues involved in the implementation of mass valuation systems and the conditions needed for doing so.Design/methodology/approach– The method makes use of case studies of and fieldwork in countries that have either recently introduced mass valuations, brought about major changes in their systems or have been working towards introducing mass valuations.Findings– Mass valuation depends upon a degree of development and transparency in property markets and an institutional structure capable of collecting and maintaining up-to-date price data and attributes of properties. Countries introducing mass valuation may need to undertake work on improving the institutional basis for this as a pre-condition for successful implementation of mass valuation.Practical implications– Although much of the literature is concerned with how to improve the statistical modelling of market prices, there are significant issues concerned with the type and quality of the data used in mass valuation models and the requirements for successful use of mass valuations.Originality/value– Much of the literature on mass valuation takes the form of the development of statistical models of value. There has been much less attention given to the issues involved in the implementation of mass valuation.