Human capital at work: performance measurement, prospective valuation and labour inequality

ABSTRACT

The 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance measurement
• metrics
• labour
• inequality
• neoliberalism
• valuation
• indicators
• gig economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guy Redden

Guy Redden is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, where he works in the field of cultural economy. His recent book Questioning Performance Measurement: Metrics, Organizations and Power was published by Sage in 2019.