COMMENSURATION AND PUBLIC REASON
In: Reason in Action, S. 233-255
In: Reason in Action, S. 233-255
In: Finance and society, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 58-63
ISSN: 2059-5999
In Inventing Value, Dave Elder-Vass (2022) argues that value is a set of beliefs about items that are strategically propagated to increase profits. The emphasis on value as a social process is particularly welcome, as this is the most fruitful direction for understanding worth. But the book leaves most of the important questions unanswered: who or what creates value, how to distinguish real and fake value, or how value can be best created and redistributed, are all left out of the discussion. A general theory of value remains elusive.
In: Socio-economic review, Band 12, Heft 1, S. 1-4
ISSN: 1475-147X
In: Capital & class, Band 3, Heft 3, S. 23-37
ISSN: 2041-0980
In: Samiolo , R 2012 , ' Commensuration and styles of reasoning : Venice, cost-benefit, and the defence of place ' , Accounting, Organizations and Society , vol. 37 , no. 6 , pp. 382-402 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aos.2012.04.001
This paper discusses some preconditions for "making things the same" by means of quantification and economic calculation. It examines a controversial cost-benefit analysis, conducted as part of the environmental appraisal of a large public sector project in Italy: the long-debated scheme for flood protection in Venice. By tracing the different "styles of calculation" that characterised the economic and environmental appraisal of the project, the paper analyses the inter-relationship between economic representations of the urban and natural environment, its political symbolism, and various attempts to intervene upon it. It follows how the objectivity of numbers is debated, stabilised or disrupted, as differing appeals to realism and accuracy are advanced in the context of different modes of intervention and practical aims. The paper shows that the "commensuration" and "standardisation" that numbers can bring about rest on how the object of calculation as well as, crucially, its subject are represented and conceived.
BASE
In: Pitts , F H 2015 , ' Normalisation, exclusion, commensuration: work, economics and the possibilities of political economy ' , Enquire , vol. 7 , no. 1 , pp. 1-12 .
This paper discusses the means by which work is normalised, some of the manifestations of its normalisation, and the possibilities for the denormalisation of work provided by the renewal of 'political' economy. It suggests that normality is not a static, fixed status which attaches itself permanently to a given social practice or phenomenon, but is subject to a process, constantly in movement and in need of reinforcement. This process is what we might call 'normalisation'. Normality is attained by means of normalisation not only in policy or popular ideology, but moreover in academic representations of the world. Academic representations do not simply reflect an external social reality, but are part of it. This paper asks what is left out in economic accounts of work, and what is missing when stock is taken only of numbers. It is suggested that political economy politicises that which the economic reason of pure economics, which has superseded it hegemonically, obfuscates. Work is central among those social phenomena that economics helps reduce to abstract, quantitative residues of what are in fact more complex networks of social relations, disciplining procedures, and modes of resistance. This paper suggests that the 'normality' that work possesses in capitalist society can be challenged by making these qualitative aspects 'public', making apparent the essential uncertainty underlying work in the context of a society moving away from it, and exposing the irreconcilable demands and desires on which its unsteady normality teeters, confronting the smooth quantitative space of economics with that which it fears most: difference, heterogeneity, incommensurability. By making these aspects public, they are rendered political and thus subject to critique. The critique and repoliticising of work opens up the opportunity of its ideological contestation and, ultimately, the possibility of its overcoming.
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Digital ; Colombia's Santurbán páramo wetlands are vital water supply sources for highland communities' livelihoods and downstream cities such as Bucaramanga. Nevertheless, they face strong degeneration because of large-scale mining extraction. Seeking to harmonize divergent interests between conservation policies, domestic water supply and mining–energy development, the national government laid out landuse zones and delimited use of the Santurbán páramo since 2014. This article illustrates how hydroterritorial tensions between the mining company, the government and citizen mobilizations for water end up fencing in the collective assets of smallholder páramo residents. To understand this complex enclosure process, we show how foreign mining capital interests, urban citizens' claims for water and government ecological boundary-making paradoxically converge. Commensuration of water meanings and values, while bridging diverse worldviews, generates new enclosures of the commons. Engaging with the conceptualization of 'hydrosocial territories' and neoliberal reconfiguration politics, we contribute to debates on how modernist commensuration works to commodify water and territory, disqualifying peasants' territorial self-governance. We conclude that Santurbán páramo residents' hydroterritorial rights are subject to the interests of social forces competing for control over this páramo territory, whether to transfer rural water to cities or to establish large-scale mining. ; Humanidades
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Digital ; Colombia's Santurbán páramo wetlands are vital water supply sources for highland communities' livelihoods and downstream cities such as Bucaramanga. Nevertheless, they face strong degeneration because of large-scale mining extraction. Seeking to harmonize divergent interests between conservation policies, domestic water supply and mining–energy development, the national government laid out landuse zones and delimited use of the Santurbán páramo since 2014. This article illustrates how hydroterritorial tensions between the mining company, the government and citizen mobilizations for water end up fencing in the collective assets of smallholder páramo residents. To understand this complex enclosure process, we show how foreign mining capital interests, urban citizens' claims for water and government ecological boundary-making paradoxically converge. Commensuration of water meanings and values, while bridging diverse worldviews, generates new enclosures of the commons. Engaging with the conceptualization of 'hydrosocial territories' and neoliberal reconfiguration politics, we contribute to debates on how modernist commensuration works to commodify water and territory, disqualifying peasants' territorial self-governance. We conclude that Santurbán páramo residents' hydroterritorial rights are subject to the interests of social forces competing for control over this páramo territory, whether to transfer rural water to cities or to establish large-scale mining. ; Ciencias Sociales
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This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for "evidence-based humanitarianism." Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016. This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.
In the dissertation, I explore the translation, publishing, and marketing process of Arabic novels in English. My research examines how translations of Arabic novels are produced as a commodity within a globalized publishing industry and circulate in a highly-charged political context. In the process, these novels--and the individuals involved in making them--produce, resist, respond to, and incorporate ideas and representations of the Arab world in the West or English-speaking world. The dissertation asks what kind of translation is possible in a cultural and political landscape shaped by wars, sanctions, media stereotypes, and histories of colonization. In each of my chapters, I address the specific practices of translation, editing, and branding that produce the novel as a global commodity that serves as an interface between the West and the Arab world. My ethnographic research was primarily conducted in Cairo, Egypt in 2010, where I worked at the American University in Cairo Press, the largest publisher of translations from Arabic to English. While there, I conducted extensive interviews and fieldwork with translators and Egyptian authors. My research examines the broader context of Arabic novels in English translation as they circulate in the politicized public sphere of the West. How are political and social elements incorporated into the text through lexical items that index cultural ephemera? How do novels as contingently-constructed objects move and circulate? Translation, as I discuss it here, is a process that extends beyond the text to include the creation of equivalence across cultural differences, differing business models and histories, varying concepts of art and literature, as well as material differences that shape the production, circulation, and reception of these novels. In doing this, my work intervenes in the scholarly literature around globalization, transnationalism, and circulation in two central ways. First, I argue that translation is a kind of scale-making project that works to move between and reconstruct local and global spheres. Second, I argue that translation renders certain elements mobile and other immobile, enabling some aspects (of language, culture, experience, and so on) to circulate while creating others as fixed. In this way, translation emerges as a key site for thinking about the construction of the global and local in the contemporary moment.
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In: Territory, politics, governance, Band 11, Heft 7, S. 1480-1500
ISSN: 2162-268X
In: European Accounting Review, Band 17, Heft 4, S. 719-745
SSRN
In: Centre for Chinese & Comparative Law Research Paper No. 2017/003
SSRN
Working paper
In: Social policy and administration, Band 48, Heft 7, S. 721-738
ISSN: 1467-9515
AbstractThe article explores what goes into one particular child indicator – children placed outside their home – and how it makes its object of description knowable and governable. This indicator is widely used in the making of social policy as a follow‐up and performance indicator and is applied also in social research, including cross‐national comparisons, to recognize problems and their scope, especially with reference to child welfare. The indicator is analyzed as an instance of commensuration. Commensuration produces depersonalized, public forms of knowledge that are often deemed superior to private, particularistic forms of knowledge. The work demonstrates how the category of out‐of‐home placement comes into being in a process wherein the particular knowledge of social workers in child welfare agencies is transformed into the macro‐social knowledge embodied in the national register and, eventually, incorporated into the indicator. Hence this commensurative process renders differences as magnitude. The empirical case examined is the Finnish child indicator. The commensuration of children placed outside the home has several consequences, which shape both child protection as a social phenomenon and the understanding that the policy measures appear to require. In addition, some suggestions are made for the concrete development of the indicator.
In: Journal of European social policy, Band 24, Heft 1, S. 19-38
ISSN: 1461-7269
This article presents an analysis of the process of commensuration in the field of pension policy. It looks at the consequences of reducing disparate and variable characteristics of pension systems to a limited set of standardized policy indicators. Although techniques of scoring complex systems through common indicators are applied today in fields as diverse as scientific research, human resources management and international development, this article is the first to examine the process of commensuration in the field of pensions. The empirical analysis looks at three cases where international institutions use standardized pension indicators to score and rank the performance of national pension systems. The first case examines the use of replacement rates in the international benchmarking of pension systems. We then focus on how rankings diverge considerably depending upon which function of the pension system is under assessment. Finally, we discuss how the public–private mix of a pension system affects the ranking of pension adequacy due to the way in which second and third pillar pensions are measured. The cases illustrate some of the problems associated with scoring and ranking the outcomes of unique and complex pension systems by means of internationally standardized indicators.