Escaping numbers? The ambiguities of the governance of education through data

KEYWORDS:

• Quantification
• governance
• education policy
• data
• resistance

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Origins

This double special issue emerged from our growing concern over the ever wider and deeper quantification of personal and collective life, engendering a world ‘based on continuous calculation at each and every point along each and every line of movement’ (Thrift, 2004, p. 583). As governance has become increasingly and more overtly techno-rational (Le Galès, 2016), governance by numbers, which reduces ‘complex processes to simple numerical indicators and rankings for purposes of management and control’ (Shore & Wright, 2015, p. 22) has become a marked characteristic of our times. Numbers used in audit and as performance indicators, metrics and rankings seek to render individuals, organisations and institutions calculable and, consequently, governable. The steering at a distance (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992)¹ often associated with neoliberal governance is increasingly complemented by practices of accounting intimacy, in which numbers are used to gain close, intimate knowledge and control of individuals and organisations (Asdal, 2011; Gorur, 2018).

The use of numbers has spread to global, national and local policy domains as disparate as health, defence, the environment, and education. Schools, universities and individuals have been rendered subject to number technologies through artefacts such as international and national comparisons, university rankings, obligatory reporting of working hours, publications counts, impact factors, financialisation, pupil testing, and credentialisation. This shaping-by-numbers of education policy spaces and organisations manipulates collective and individual subjectivities of people such as the performance-evaluated teacher, the administrator, and the test-oriented student. Beyond their use in specific educational sites, numbers have become an important and persuasive public pedagogical force, for instance in the global financial crisis, human mobility, environmental sustainability, diet, and austerity. Numbering creates and sustains particular regimes of epistemic governance affecting both civil collectives and individuals. For instance, citizens are educated to accept austerity, fear the numbers of migrants and to eat five fruit and vegetables a day through the persuasive – and often intimidating (Ewing, 2011) – power of numbers. Numbers are now a significant force in the operation of states, international organizations and the conduct of the self.

We first engaged with the topic of how numbers had escaped into our lives and how we might escape from them at a seminar we organized at Tampere University in June 2017, borrowing the title of Radhika Gorur’s keynote lecture and subsequent article Escaping Numbers? (2018). The articles published here emerged from that fruitful meeting of international scholars from across the social sciences interested in governance by numbers, and a subsequent open call for papers. The special issue brings together seven original articles concerned with governance by numbers across different national education systems and scales of governance from global to local, and diverse sectors of formal education from early childhood education to higher education and academic work. In this manner, the special issue offers contextually rich accounts highlighting the advantages of analytical attention to the generative relationship between numbers and their multiple contexts. It also includes three reviews of recently published books related to our thematic focus, and a provocative afterword.

Without destabilizing the existing consensus on the centrality and influence of numbers as modern tools of knowledge production, policy instruments and technologies of government, in this special issue we seek to trouble and to offer alternatives to the recurring determinism and inevitability with which numbers tend to be approached in academic literature. In her useful overview of prevailing critiques of numbers, Gorur (2017) identifies two main strands and explains their implications for research and public debate. Human-centred critiques focus on numbers as making humans who govern, or who are governed, by numbers either powerful or vulnerable, with the ensuing analysis concentrating on the so-called intended or unintended usages and effects of numerical data (Gorur, 2017). When numbers are critiqued, in contrast, from a technical perspective, with the facade of their objectivity and neutrality problematized, they can be seen as vulnerable. The conversation then continues in the form of the pursuit of refined measurements to restore their claims to authoritative knowledge. Numbers need to be understood concurrently as: technical projects developed by experts and relying on contingent technical skills and machinery; sociological phenomena that impact some of the most significant institutions; and as political in terms of provoking discussions and directing policy actions (Gorur, 2017).

In this special issue, we sought to engage in a form of ontological politics (Mol, 1999) by querying what possibilities of enquiry are yielded when we do not start with an implicit assumption that numbers are all-powerful. That is, because numbers are shaped by, and in turn shape, practices, and practices are uncertain, they remain open, contested and contestable. This sensibility is, arguably, derived from science and technology studies and actor-network theory, which prompt us to see actors such as numbers and their technologies as ‘a fragile assemblage performing itself as solid and immutable’ (Fenwick & Edwards, 2011, p. 719). Numbers as socio-material, heterogeneous arrangements are not neutral but, rather, performative devices, and emerge as a result of political work and temporal consensus. Following Law and Ruppert (2013), we also see numbers as potentially internally inconsistent and incoherent. Such characteristics enable numbers to perform different tasks – and create collateral realities – as well as to travel routes unforeseen by their strategists (Law & Ruppert, 2013).

The great escape of numbers

Responding to recent calls for systematic investigations of quantification and governance by numbers in situ (Mennicken & Espeland, 2019), the authors in this special issue explore numbers empirically. By way of context, therefore, it is important to consider the historical dimension of how numbers initially escaped into the domain of education.

The use of numbers in social and economic life has a history reaching back to ancient times. In their historiographical review, Carmona and Ezzamel (2007) discuss ancient accounting systems across three modes: individual-state, state-individual and individual-individual. These ancient systems concentrated on the control of money and other resources, and on economic work effort ‘via the specification of prior targets, the allocation of tasks to individuals, the measurement of actual performance, the identification of differences between targets and actual achievements, and the reporting of action taken to deal with the differences’ (Carmona & Ezzamel, 2007, p. 196). Such systems were primarily concerned with financial control, particularly at a distance, and the safeguarding of property. Systems of accounting in medieval England sought to ensure the accountability of stewards on noble estates, preserving the landowner’s capital and fiscal propriety. In Northern Italy’s commercial revolution from the mid-13th to the mid-14th centuries, merchants for the first time began combining their capital in order to undertake trading ventures. Investors’ need for a ready and easy account of their share of profit stimulated the adoption of the new method of double entry bookkeeping – which is still the bedrock of modern day accounting systems (Bryer, 1993). As industrialisation advanced in Europe, accounting became an ever-more important aspect of emergent capitalist economic life, allowing the recording of profit and facilitating capitalist development. Accounting became embedded into commercial life as the accounting profession emerged. The modern state also increasingly relied on systems of accounting to ensure probity with state monies. Concurrently, quantitative techniques began to emerge in a drive for efficiency in business activities – most famously with the publication of Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 (Taylor, 2004 [1911]). Taylorism, the quantification of work and the use of the data arising in application of rational principles of efficiency to its management, rapidly became the organising principle of industrial production. In social, as opposed to strictly economic, affairs, numbers made a later entry: 18th century German states saw the emergence of the new science of statistics – literally, the science of the state. States began collecting demographic data in order to better manage their affairs. This led, for instance, to current practices of regular population censuses.

The use of numbers in social and economic affairs is therefore far from new, and by the mid-20th century a panoply of number technologies, operated by a range of professionals, had become well established. However, as neoliberalism took root, engendering the rise of new public management (NPM), numbers began to escape from the relatively restricted toolbox in which they were kept. Numbers were increasingly less confined to the determination of profit, the management of a factory’s inventory or the counting of people. The technologies of numbers escaped to become a hegemonic force in their own right in all aspects of social life, crafting and determining it. Steffen Mau, in this special issue, provides a nuanced account of this process and its consequences.

The imperative for this was neoliberal regimes’ demand for tools that would enable them to effect NPM. Neoliberalism involves the dismantling of boundaries between the economic and the social, rendering the latter accessible to the former and making it a source of financial profit (Hood, 1989). This is legitimised via the language of economy and efficiency – that the involvement of the market sphere in social life will cost less and result in better use of scarce public resources. The logic of this was regarded as self-evident – that the market in its pursuit of profit was a paragon of the efficient use of economic resources. Moreover, the market had at its disposal a suite of number technologies and tools – financial accounting, management accounting, statistical data – that enabled it to do this work. These were seen as having the potential to provide real economic productivity returns – as Gorur notes in her afterword in this special issue.

Problematically, the end goal of the market is profit, which in economic terms is a measure of the economic efficiency with which resources (labour, capital etc.) have been utilised – a measure of results. The social sphere is not amenable to such measures as it is not-for-profit. In countries such as the UK, where there was an imperative to open up public services to private providers, new measures were required as a proxy for monetary profit. NPM increasingly worked by unbundling public services so that they could be put out to contract with private providers. At first this was in areas such as cleaning or refuse collection, but now extends to the management and operation of entire complex organisations such as government research laboratories or prisons. Contracts require the specification of outcomes – the performance of the service at a certain standard – and this drove the adoption of numbers-based performance measures to enable contractual monitoring. The handmaidens of the market – the accounting profession – rapidly adapted their technologies of management control to this new operating environment (Baskaran & Boden, 2007; Dunleavy & Hood, 1994; Hood, 1990). In this way, numbers escaped to the social realm, used to determine what was an effective in the delivery of public services. Once there, numbers came to be used to encourage often ruthless competition between even wholly public providers, with the aim of driving down costs and increasing efficiency. This is a notable feature of both UK and, as Gorur notes in her afterword, Australian schools, where league tables and performance measures are used to make schools compete and to facilitate parental ‘choice’ of where their children are educated.

Understandings of efficiency in this context reflected the underpinning technologies used – the efficient use of the economic resources inputted. Thus, a privately operated prison, for example, can appear more effective than a state-operated one because it provides prisoner-days at a lower cost. As Maiju Paananen shows in this special issue, even Finland’s early childhood education appears to be far from immune to this logic, perhaps counter to the prevailing image, as a reviewer of her paper has insightfully pointed out. In the circumstances of constrained public resources, considerations of narrow economic efficiency have come to predominate. For instance, in 1980s Britain, the university vice-chancellors’ response to economic recession under Margaret Thatcher was to argue in their Jarrett Report (CVCP, 1985) that academic self-determination in universities, whilst important, was something of a luxury in times of economic difficulties. The result was to set UK higher education on a path to managerialisation and marketisation. This repeated enactment of narrow visions of economic efficiency in the determination of social outcomes have become embedded across the public realm, including education. Numbers have not only escaped to the social world, but have colonised it. Thus, the original opening up of the public sector to private contractors has resulted in the ingress of number technologies that now dominate the practice of public service delivery. Education, whether in schools or universities, and across countries, as this special issue shows, has become a particular target of such practices because it consumes such a large proportion of public expenditure.

The attractiveness of numbers arises from their aura of disinterestedness, impersonality, objectivity and universality that lends legitimacy (Desrosières, 1998). These properties make numbers appealing for actors who seek to exercise direct and indirect power because they involve what Gorur (2018) describes as ‘non-authority’ – a silent, implicit authority in which the exercise of power is difficult to discern. States and international organisations deploy numbers to make political prerogatives operable in practice as they enable long-distance control without shattering individuals’ autonomy (Rose & Miller, 1992). But, numbers also carry an aura of being transparent and accessible, thus fitting the democratic ideals of informing the public and enabling citizens to monitor and hold power holders to account (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015). Performing all these tasks, numbers work by stripping away the actual, often conflictual and subjective contexts of their production, and the granular, ambiguous detail of the phenomena they claim to represent.

Government at a distance by numbers relies upon and promotes a parallel existence of soft and hard regimes of regulation. It is connected to neoliberal governance that reconciles

decentralised action (subsidiarity, self-responsibility) with centralized assessment (standardization to facilitate exchange and valuation in the vast spaces and to make long distance control something the actors aim to achieve by pursuing their interests) (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015, p. 22)

It can be argued that performance measurement and evaluation seek to obtain compliance through both externally imposed levers and internally reinforced targets (Olssen & Peters, 2005). The fact that educational statistics are increasingly deployed by governmental structures, but also a much broader set of actors, and are made available publicly in printed and web-based media, diversifies the scope of users and the type of action performed with data. Data are implicated in the soft and hard regimes of government that operate on and through official and popular layers simultaneously, manifesting (or at least aspiring to) extreme mobility of data and its wide circulation and adaptability for different regulatory tasks (see Piattoeva, 2015). In the public domain of education, numbers have come to perform a special role as the numerical signifiers of quality assessment procedures that are simplistically equated to the level of human capital, the prospects for economic growth and the global competitiveness in individual nations (Valverde, 2014). Thus, through numbers, education becomes an important but far from unambiguous element in the growth of the neoliberal economy.

In this special issue, these broader issues are forensically analysed in Steffen Mau’s paper, Numbers matter! The society of indicators, scores and ratings. Mau notes that numbers do not just quantify social life, but valorise it, and do not just reflect reality but differentiate between actors. He notes further that digitalization enables the economisation of social life. Through processes of allegedly objective ascription, certain activities and outcomes are valorised. Mau dwells on the processes of nomination that enact these processes: who names the rules of the game, who designs the algorithms in ‘big data’, identifying the experts in expert regimes that construct the numbers. In Mau’s analysis, data become an ‘übercapital’ whereby it generates further capitals.

The ambiguity of numbers

The complexly intertwined continuities between escape from and seizure by numbers form the focus of the rest of the papers in this special issue. In the spirit of the practice of hope in education research (Kenway, Boden, & Fahey, 2014), some papers also address how numbers might be escaped from, either strategically or by chance due to their contingent and incoherent nature. In her afterword, Radhika Gorur also asks what it is possible to think and practice if we start to embrace numbers by means of complexification. Numbers exercise power by becoming part of the world as they are circulated, and their visibility and power are a product of this circulation (Beer, 2016). Equally, if data do not flow and travel well they cannot (be used to) govern (Grek et al., 2011). Methodologically, tracing circulation is about examining the continuity or discontinuity between descriptive measures and prescriptive outcomes (Beer, 2016). And, at the same time, circulation is a recursive play of subtraction and addition of contextual narratives of what measures are, what they are good for and what they should achieve (Beer, 2016; Espeland, 2015). The process of circulation is generative of possibilities that may strengthen or weaken numbers used for governance and public accountability. Frictionless data circulation is a rarely achieved ideal because of context-specific blockages and frustrations (Beer, 2016). And, according to Asdal ‘politics and accounting practices are not questions of one will or of one desire, but rather of encounters and confrontations between competing projects and desires’ (2011, p. 7). Understanding numbers in this way reveals their variations and messy realities, and the broader political orders to which they may belong. The conditions required to make numbers powerful may, counterintuitively, lead to their weakening. In what follows we engage with the articles published in this double special issue in light of these contradictory and generative dynamics.

Inertia and spill-over of numbers

Halford, Pope, and Weal (2013) issue a call to move away from seeing numbers as neutral products of engineering design and instead interrogate the social construction of data – the micro-politics of artefacts, choices and the interpretations that assemble them. Echoing this, two papers focus specifically on data production and the making of new objects and issues of concern by means of quantification (Desrosières, 1998). In Trapped in university rankings: bridging global competitiveness and local innovation Tero Erkkilä and Ossi Piiroinen examine the emergence of global and European level innovation and competitiveness rankings that take regions or cities as units of analysis and which claim to offer alternatives or even correctives to existing cross-national rankings. Their example shows how, in the context of scarcity of available data to construct new rankings of such scale, existing global university rankings escape their initial usage and become opportune components in framing and measuring a new phenomenon. These new rankings transport the global imaginaries of competition to regional and city levels, demonstrating how numbers are Trojan horses, carrying a set of ideological assumptions and values in addition to their built-in categories and mathematical calculations (see also Kuusipalo & Alastalo, this special issue). The construction of new numbers is always political as a result of choices, inclusions and exclusions; yet, numbers need to be legitimate and appear objective, which is a laborious achievement (Williamson & Piattoeva, 2019). As Erkkilä and Piiroinen evocatively show by deconstructing emerging rankings of innovation, in struggling to construct new numbers, their producers make use of existing ones because they are both available and readily accepted. Old numbers carry unique ‘epistemic capital’ (Alasuutari, Rautalin, & Syväterä, 2015) that new numbers still need to accumulate, and the numbers only acquire capital through circulation (Piattoeva, 2015). In order to claim legitimacy (see also Kuusipalo & Alastalo in this issue), indicators as policy instruments (as opposed to policy knowledge) rely on ‘the modernist and liberal image of public policy’ as opposed to legal basis (p. 61).

Erkkilä and Piironen demonstrate how measurements of education – such as university rankings – spill-over into other areas seemingly removed from educational context. Numbers collected for one purpose often escape their initial usage and become embodied in new indicators or comparative rankings in an effort to objectify and measure new and more complex phenomena. Ironically, these new figures are hostages to existing numbers, meaning that what gets measured is determined by what has been measured before – a type of expert and data inertia described earlier by Merry and Wood (2015). This is also how existing power relations endure and may structure knowledge production through indicators: inequalities in monetary and symbolic resources enhance some organizations or countries as data holders and knowledge producers at the expense of others (Merry & Wood, 2015; Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015). This carries important ramifications for how particular phenomena are understood and governed (Merry, 2016). At the same time, repetitive usage of existing figures enhances cross-referencing between numerical representations, ensuring normalization of quantification on the one hand and standardization of numerical representations that excludes possibilities for alternative accounts or non-measurement on the other.

How things get measured often influences how they get managed. In the words of Merry (2016, p. 378) ‘each organization’s measurement scheme ends up reinforcing the wisdom of its own solution to the problem’. In this way, indeed, the analytical separation between the act of measurement (numbers as knowledge) and the act of intervention or governance (numbers as policy instruments and technologies of governance) criticized by Gorur (2017) becomes problematic. This is exactly what Paula Kuusipalo and Marja Alastalo illustrate in their paper The early school leaver count as a policy instrument in EU governance: the unintended effects of an indicator. Their analysis is of the early school leaver count (the proportion of young people leaving education and training before the minimum school leaving age) as a policy instrument in EU governance. Kuusipalo and Alastalo commenced their journey of examining the construction and political effects of the indicator by stumbling on a number that did not seem just ‘right’. The EU reported the national education interruption rate – the percentage of students interrupting their school education – for Finland as just slightly below the EU average of 9.5 per cent in 2014, while national statistics indicated the rate of pupils successfully completing compulsory schooling at between 99.5 and 99.8 per cent. In their careful investigation of the production of ESL indicator, the authors trace the multiple processes of translation required to convert complex local conditions and culturally-embedded meanings into quantitative indicators that end up flattening and framing what gets to be understood as ‘early’, ‘school’, ‘training’ or ‘leaver’. Moreover, by setting the indicator of ‘early’ at the age between 18–24, and coding the level of education as a binary of reaching or not reaching upper secondary or tertiary level of education, indicators set norms on what ought to be desirable as well as signal ways to achieve it. Thus, variables may be confused for explanatory systems and targets of policy intervention. One of the authors’ messages is that one must know how data are gathered in order to understand how problems are framed and why certain solutions are proposed in preference to others. In this manner, policy solutions are not only framed discursively by giving shape and meaning to the problems to be addressed (Bacchi, 2016), but also through the seemingly mundane and technical construction of calculations that underpin knowledge on the basis of which problems and policies are drafted.

Indicators as a technology of governance at a distance are particularly prominent in contexts where only soft regulation is authorized, such as the EU’s authority over education policies of its member states (see Kuusipalo & Alastalo: Lewis; and Erkkilä & Piironen in this special issue). What is clear is that governance by indicators builds on resources available at the EU level and in member states. The calculation of a certain EU-determined indicator such as ‘early school leaver’ is faced with ‘not only differences in national education systems and societal conditions, but also in school performance and data availability’ (Kuusipalo & Alastalo in this special issue, p. 61). In addition to EU-governance by indictors being determined substantially by available data, practices and meanings, its possibilities are constrained or enhanced by existing demand for numbers, as we illustrate in the following.

Trust in and demand for numbers

The demand for and availability of numbers is taken up by Steven Lewis in his article Becoming European’? Respatialising the European Schools System through PISA for Schools on the use of PISA for Schools – one of the latest extensions of the well-known Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) – in the European Schools System (ESS). The ESS was established to provide education for children of EU personnel in the spirit of European shared ideals, and has started to grow through a more recent network of affiliated ESS schools open to all. Even though ESS schools have been operating for many years, they were attracted to PISA in their recent search for concrete evidence of their quality. In other words, ESS schools adopt PISA numbers not because of, but despite, the loose accountability regime and a lack of European school education quality indicators. An additional factor is rising parental expectations of ‘value-for-money’ and eagerness to demonstrate the high quality of educational provision. PISA for Schools helps to fulfil two contradictory agendas. On the one hand, PISA numbers help attest to the existence of ESS schools as a unique system in its own right with a certified level of education quality. On the other, they simultaneously attach ESS schools to common global standards, and use comparison as validation and a marker of adherence to global ‘best practice’. Adopting terminology deployed by Erkkilä and Piironen, PISA for Schools offers epistemic capital (Alasuutari et al., 2015) that legitimizes ESS in the eyes of multiple stakeholders.

In order for numbers to circulate and be used to produce knowledge and, in a Foucauldian sense, conduct conduct, people must trust numbers as legitimate representations of a phenomenon, acting on these numbers as if they spoke truth for themselves. As Miguel Lim’s article Impact case studies: what accounts for the need for numbers in impact evaluation? demonstrates, trust in numbers is paradoxically both strong and fragile. Whilst considered objective and untouched by human bias, the reductionist nature of numbers is equally well recognized and may be raised at will to delegitimize them. When numbers are used in the politics of accountability and high-stakes decision-making on the allocation of funds, they become increasingly mistrusted as prompts to gaming to make numbers look better. In contrast, there are examples of deliberate attempts to make numbers look worse, as documented by Pedro Bolea in his book review of The datafication of primary and early years education: playing with numbers by Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes in this special issue.

Mistrust of numbers led the UK’s university research quality evaluation exercise, the Research Excellence Framework, to shun the quantification of research impact, preferring to elicit narrative case studies of societal benefit instead. However, REF’s qualitative narratives also become suspect and fragile, as the actors’ risk of reputational damage or loss of funding for perceived underperformance remain considerable; the wider policies and discourses surrounding the collection of REF data did not change. In this sense, it is not numbers per se that evoke gaming, but what the information – in either numerical or narrative forms – is collected for. Both numbers and narratives are fragile and suspect when inserted into high-stakes politics. Lim’s paper both collapses the distinction between the quantitative and the qualitative (see also Callon & Law’s 2005 discussion on this), and simultaneously illuminates the exclusive epistemic capital and credibility enjoyed by numbers as opposed to narratives. In the case reported by Lim, numbers make a come-back, continuing to enjoy more trust than qualitative stories. Thus, numbers maintain an upper hand over other means of representing, judging and communicating phenomena that are societally and professionally contentious.

Lim’s paper shows that numbers are perceived as effective ways of managing people in the context of policies that are prone to widespread criticism and disengagement. The REF exercise is an onerous undertaking involving voluminous information. REF is widely criticised by many academics who question its purpose and the accuracy of its outcomes, and are mistrustful of the new professional classes hired to oversee the production of institutional narratives. Trust in numbers is thus contingent upon trust in the expertise behind numbers – a point also raised by Steffen Mau in his paper. In the contexts of high-stakes accountability, trust is easily undermined on both sides, further widening the gap between academics and university management.

Informed publics

Numbers need to be both stable to be transferred across spaces without distortion, but also mobile, combinable and comparable to enable further calculations and judgements (Miller & Rose, 1990). Paradoxically, as numbers only gain authority and capital through circulation, it is these processes of circulation that may enhance or undermine their power. As the papers in this special issue reveal, numbers maybe be contested from the point of how they reduce or misrepresent the phenomena that they claim to capture. At the same time, the same set of numbers may, in fact, become a ‘resource for less powerful actors to make [certain] problems visible and politically salient’ (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015, p. 22). The concept of informed publics (Gorur, 2018; cf. Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009), delineating how actors might unsettle existing accounts and calculations and rearticulate them as controversies instead of closures, enables us to move the spotlight from the governing strategist seeking to exercise power to the subjectivities and agency of those assumed to be governed by numbers. Numbers depend on adherents, but the irony is that numbers depend on both informed and uninformed publics. On the one hand, numbers require publics who are readily socialized into the authority of numbered knowledge. But if these publics possess too much numeracy, they become capable of undermining the authority of numbers. Thus, from a source of certainty, publics easily escape into a source of uncertainty. In this manner, both government at a distance and intimate governance remain contingent.

As Helena Hinke Dobrochinski Candido explains in her article Datafication in schools: enactments of quality assurance and evaluation policies in Brazil, policy enactment demarcates ‘the possibilities of policy acceptance, resistance and subversion within ad-hoc, borrowing, re-ordering, displacement, innovation, and re-invention processes’ (ref p. 126). Candido’s paper questions the linear functionality of governance at a distance through numbers produced by large-scale assessments in Brazil when the centre fails to communicate its overall policies and prerogatives, showing how school-level actors may deal differently with numbers to the policymakers’ plans. When policies operating through numbers enter the school space, they are given new or more concrete meaning and operationalized into concrete actions. This is where they might also escape the intentions of the strategist, but not entirely. Informed publics may re- or de-politicize particular educational issues. Politization opens up numbers and policies to reinterpretation and shifts power relations. Schools vary a great deal: they manifest a contradictory space populated by both mutually reinforcing as well as colliding and contradicting policies, practices and ethos. As school actors give local meaning to numbers, this practice may lead to obeying the regulations, but also to ignoring, proposing alternatives or resisting them.

Even though the proliferation of numbers is hard to reverse, examples of reflexivity documented by Candido show how school-level actors who are far removed from the centres of data production and aggregation engage in reflexivity, questioning imaginaries of straightforward compliance and submission to numbers. School-level actors are surprisingly aware of the constructed and reductionist nature of numbers, perhaps more than research would give them credit for (see also Mugler, 2015). The professional self of some school actors such as teachers or administrators is not as easily turned into a complicit number mentality, though examples documented in the article are hard to group in a binary manner as either submitting to or resisting numbers. Instead, Candido unpacks the intricate nature of how people relate to, talk about and take numbers into their decision-making processes in particular school and societal contexts.

Maiju Paananen’s paper Fluctuating child–staff ratio: governing by numbers in Finnish early childhood education, addresses governing by numbers through child-staff ratios in early childhood education and might be read together with Pedro Balea’s review of The datafication of primary and early years education: playing with numbers by Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes. They consider the proliferation of governance by numbers in countries with rather different political contexts in relation to governing early childhood education by data. Even though the Finnish system lacks a national curriculum, a national steering system or the national measurements of children’s skills or learning (such as baseline assessment in England), and municipalities enjoy great autonomy in deciding on the distribution of funds, it is not exempt from the allure of numbers, particularly in the context of resource constraints and ensuing calls for cost efficiency. In this context, and due to an apparent lack of other data, the staff-child ratio (the only number mandated in national early childhood education legislation), became an ‘elastic number’ (Piattoeva, 2015) that started to connote such diverse matters as quality, safety and efficient use of resources. In the latter case, the maximum number of children per educator became a desirable target to pursue in the name of efficiency, leading to practices such as overbooking of kindergartens akin to overbooking flights to avoid running at lower than expected capacity. As Paananen explains, teachers’ reactions to these practices are not uniform and range between gaming, strategic use of numbers, opting out or refusing to collect data – though the latter two choices remain marginal.

Although Paananen’s study documents a much softer case of trusting numerical data to organize pedagogical activities or account for children than that documented in Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes’ book, it nevertheless also shows how numbers attached to funding decisions enter the everyday practices of kindergartens. These numbers add responsibilities to teachers’ everyday work, assign new meanings to tasks regularly performed or divert attention from children to numbers and from educational work to ‘passing time’. New tasks include not only inserting numbers into digital platforms but also, and importantly, passing intelligent judgment as to which numbers, and when, should be inserted. Managing numbers is also strongly present as a practice in Bradbury and Roberts-Holmes’ book, with a remarkable case of, amongst others, reporting low baseline numbers to demonstrate better progress. Calculated misrepresentation is dictated by exigencies of data management and the political consequences of ‘bad’ numbers as opposed to the interest of the child. In this case, gaming data seems to be a double-edged sword: while it momentarily empowers teachers, administrators or their institutions, this happens at the expense of the most vulnerable. Paananen also shows that while the availability and appeal of numbers may diminish the professional authority of teachers or administrators, they may conversely strengthen authority such as when teachers address parents’ concerns over safety by referring to the child-staff ratio or when municipal managers amass data to gain a unique comparative oversight.

Concluding thoughts

To paraphrase Humpty Dumpty in ‘Through the Looking Glass’, when those in power use a number, it may mean just what they choose it to mean – neither more nor less. But quantification, counting, accounting, enumeration and numbering are inherently and simultaneously complex socio-cultural and socio-technical practices. Although often portrayed as robust, objective and neutral, numbers are nevertheless inherently interpretive, fluid and amorphous. Grounded in science and technology studies, we started with the notion that numbers are contingent (non-human) actors, or actor-networks, dependent on the will of the multiple human and non-human actors and processes that bring them into being and determine how they are used, and by whom. This renders numbers prone to both reinterpretation and iatrogenic effects. Moreover, as governance remains uncertain and ridden with tensions and unfulfilled expectations, numbers too are likely to escape from the different processes of their production, circulation and application. Through that, they may offer: the surprising, but still seemingly rare capacity for resistance to hegemonic power (resistance as strategic or coincidental); enable and facilitate critique and democratic action by informing practices, behaviour and debate, and; give rise to unexpected numerical competence. The capacity for resistance, through for instance counter-discourses in different sites, can enable more open, democratic debate by informed publics.

The paradox of numbers is that their legitimacy as objective representations of reality or impartial tools of governance relies on de-contextualization and opacity, on being removed from the complex living texture of the world. Thus numerical technologies are always subject to a tricky trade-off between the rigidity of commensuration required to make things quantifiable and mobile, and the demand of making these reductive numbers still speak to the concrete idiosyncratic contexts in which they must make sense to spur action (at a distance or intimately) (Rottenburg & Engle Merry, 2015). Thus there is a fine line between rigidity and deceit, and to us this manifests in both the inescapability of escaping numbers that we see in the cases documented in the papers by Mau, Kuusipalo and Alastalo or Erkkilä and Piiroinen, and the strategic possibilities they offer, as Miguel Lim or Maiju Paananen demonstrate . Overall, numbers cannot just feed off the irrefutable authority and objectivity of numerical information.

In presenting the papers published in this special issue, we suggested that the ambiguity of governance by numbers could be rendered visible by examining the dynamics between the development of new numbers and the surprising inertia of existing calculations, the contingent nature of trust in and demand for numbers, and the role of informed publics as key adherents. This subject calls for yet further empirical research and we suggest that this should go beyond rational explanations of engagement with numbers. Accounts of informed publics usually imply those publics responding to numbers by way of rational action. This is clearly the notion of reactivity raised by Espeland and Sauder: ‘Because people are reflexive beings who continually monitor and interpret the world and adjust their actions accordingly, measures are re-active. Measures elicit responses from people who intervene in the objects they measure’ (2007, p. 1). Reactivity as a rational activity cannot perhaps fully capture the attraction and effects of quantification, and it might be important to add an affective component to the analysis, as several authors have recently argued (Brøgger & Staunaes, 2016; Sellar, 2015; Staunæs & Pors, 2015). Candido’s paper, for instance, clearly emphasizes the power of emotions in impacting how policy is enacted on the school level as part of a complex assemblage of different contextual factors and contingent events. Equally Erin Sonneveldt and Riyad Shahjahan, in their review of Engines of anxiety: academic rankings, reputation, and accountability, argue that relations to numbers are constituted through circulating negative affective states such as fear, anxiety, shame, but also positive ones, such as pride or hope, and that these remain poorly acknowledged and undertheorized. They ask further, how are rankings as ‘engines of anxiety’ tied to questions of modern subject’s desire for ontological security?

Paul Prinsloo, in his review of Williamson’s (2017) book Big Data and Education here, resonates with this double special issue, reiterating the message of the centrality of developing ‘conceptual and methodological tools to investigate the social lives of educational data by performing genealogical investigations of their tangled social, technical, political, economic and scientific threads’ (p. 205). This special issue illustrated that one generative methodological tool may be to approach the power of numbers and their social lives in the processes of governance as contingent achievements, contending that it is important to study both the becoming powerful of numbers and the potentialities for failure and resistance embedded therein.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nelli Piattoeva

Dr Nelli Piattoeva is associate professor in New Social Research programme and Faculty of Education and Culture at Tampere University, Finland. Her research principally focuses on the quantification and datafication of public education as a means of education governance in the post-Soviet space and Russia in particular. She has recently published articles in Learning, Media and Technology and Critical Studies in Education, and chapters in edited collections such as World Yearbook of Education 2019, Politics of Quality in Education: A Comparative Study on Brazil, China, and Russia and Education Governance and Social Theory: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Research.

Rebecca Boden

Professor Rebecca Boden is research director of the New Social Research Programme at Tampere University, Finland – an 8m€ profiling programme to develop the next generation of interdisciplinary research at the university. Rebecca was formerly a professor of accounting at various institutions in the UK. Her research work focuses primarily on the effects of regimes of financing and management on sites of knowledge production in higher education and science, where she adopts a critical perspective. She has also worked extensively on social justice issues in social welfare and taxation. She is currently working on the taxation of private schools in England with colleagues from Melbourne and Cardiff Metropolitan Universities; on vice chancellors’ remuneration with a colleague from Deakin University, and on student fees with colleagues from Plymouth University and the University of the West of England.

Notes

1. Here we refer mainly to a classical definition of steering/governance/action at a distance as an assemblage of mechanisms that shape the conduct of diverse subjects without shattering their autonomy (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 14). Government at a distance requires that an object of government can be ‘represented, depicted in a way which both grasps its truth and re-presents it in a form in which it can enter the sphere of conscious calculation’ (Rose & Miller, 1992, p. 182). In other words, government relies upon a calculative technology that ‘renders the world thinkable, taming its intractable reality by subjecting it to the disciplined analyses of thought’ (Rose & Miller, 1992, p. 182–183). Phenomena are translated into information that is stable, mobile, combinable and comparable (Miller & Rose, 1990, p. 7).