Magic Numbers, Figures, and Digits: The Power of Tricks and Wonder-full Quantifications

Abstract

We draw on the history of magic and rhetoric to explore the interplay between the visible and the invisible underpinning calculative practices for management and organizing: the desire for order through quantification on the one hand, and the necessary uncertain jump required by the absent, the unknown, and the mysterious underpinning these practices, on the other hand. We intend to move the understanding of calculative practices from the emphasis on cognition (and therefore on positive, visibly present, realities), to the senses, illusion and mystery, and their drawing on the negative, the absent, the invisible and the ‘spells’ in between words, lines and numbers. We do so by offering distinct but related snapshots in the history of calculative practices. We start with accounting numbers and how the spread of double-entry bookkeeping intertwined with mathematical magic in the early Renaissance. We move to figures, and particularly to the analysis of data visualizations in modern financial reports and dashboards. We end with the current magical traits of cryptocurrencies and we discuss their promises for transparency, safety and speed, which rely on the magical appeal of technology. We show that, to understand the power of necessarily incomplete calculative practices, scholars have to research the opaque, mysterious and magical mechanisms through which these practices, despite or because of their imperfection, provide a pragmatic response to the uncertainty of management and organizing.