Modernising government, aestheticising decision information: how ‘business-like’ quantification turns performance numbers into aesthetic enumerated entities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Adopting numbering practices is central to ‘business-like’ public organising. These practices were primarily critiqued for their more-than-technical, normative character. This paper expands the critique of numbers in governance by considering numbers’ epistemic consequences in public sector work. Drawing on Whitehead’s philosophy of aesthetics and an ethnography of enumeration inside a public agency in England, the paper argues that enumeration techniques, when relying on accounting categories and used within a ‘business-like’ public sector, end up enacting knowledge objects that are aesthetic in kind. Numbered entities taken as performance evidence (metrics, rankings) end up (a) part of a project of enunciation, (b) opaque for conceptual interrogation, and (c) attuned to through bodily affect. Such characterisation makes two contributions. First, it conceptualises ‘aesthetic enumerated entities’ as a way of understanding instrumental knowledge in organising. Second, it extends our scope of engaging with the aesthetic by going beyond conceptualisations focused on art or beauty.