Audit targets reshape institutional activity toward whatever is measured

Evidence

Anxiety about falling standards in school examinations is now a regular feature of the summertime in Britain. Yet if students are less skilled and knowledgeable than their predecessors, this is due not to a decline in the quality of examinations per se, but to the fact that all of the teaching is geared towards passing the exams. Narrowly focused ‘exam drill’ replaces a wider engagement with subjects. Similarly, hospitals perform many routine procedures instead of a few serious, urgent operations, because this allows them to hit the targets they are assessed on (operating rates, success rates and reduction in waiting time) more effectively. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 93

Categorization

• XREF: The Goodhart’s Law / Campbell’s Law effect; connects to the book’s earlier target-culture discussion and broadly to audit-culture literature (Power’s ‘Audit Society’). — connects to: Audit culture makes symbolic representations of work displace actual work; Small everyday decisions can reshape institutions through accumulated practice — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 119; Audited work reshapes labor toward producing representations rather than outcomes — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 91 (+11 more)
• ADDENDUM: Would pair with how targets-as-ends echo the RAE/REF material in ‘Grafting & Growth’ only loosely; more relevant to the sacrifice article’s logic of ritualized measurement.

Related

• Performance targets distort actual work toward what is measured (similarity 0.87)
• Target-driven institutions substitute easy measurable tasks for meaningful ones (similarity 0.86)
• Audit culture makes symbolic representations of work displace actual work (similarity 0.86)
• Audit systems incentivize institutions to grade themselves lower than deserved (similarity 0.82)
• Audited representation displaces actual performance as work’s real goal (similarity 0.81)
• Audited work reshapes labor toward producing representations rather than outcomes (similarity 0.80)
• Colonising metrics create new mentalities and incentives inside organisations, not just reporting burdens (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonising metrics create new mentalities and incentives inside organisations, not just reporting burdens #expands (0.90) — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 19
• Governance now leads with metrics to produce the practices rather than measuring established ones. #expands (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 601
• Neoliberal auditing techniques aimed to redirect policy, not persuade economists #expands (0.80) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 155
• Governance by incentives and benchmarks replaces top-down law and rule #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 56
• Behavioral monitoring replaces reasons with algorithmic performance thresholds in urban governance #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 716
• Institutional power enables through constraint rather than disruption #qualifies (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1822