Abstract
AbstractRecent sociological scholarship on market design is ill-equipped to understand the normative and political aspects of experts’ practices in connection to political conflicts over the commodification of social rights. I develop an original approach to the politicized use of market devices to address collective concerns in a noneconomic policy field: education. When designing a high-stakes school accountability system, policymakers in Chile confronted a moral conundrum: should schools be valued according to their students’ absolute proficiency, or according to the school’s relative effectiveness? Progressive and conservative experts in charge of settling this dilemma pushed for using the statistical model (OLS vs. HLM) that yielded rankings that fit their moral preferences. Through qualitative analyses of experts’ real-world application of quantitative methods, as well as experts’ interpretations of these methods’ performative consequences, I mobilize the much-debated concept of “moral background” to unravel the conditions for subsuming ideological dissent into consensual forms of decision-making.
Highlights
By examining how normative preferences regarding the marketization of social policy percolate into market experts’ work of market evaluation and repair, this research confirms what critical theory has long argued at least since Habermas [1971], namely, that technocrats’ scientific judgements are neither monolithic nor impartial
The School Ordinalization Methodology (SOM) was devised to help regulators “see and make decisions about the world in economic ways” [Hirschman and Berman 2014: 782], making market agents governable at a distance [Rose and Miller 2010]
Governing the market became technically possible inasmuch as experts rendered the SOM capable of performing—in the sense of simultaneously declaring and rendering real [Callon 2007, 1998, MacKenzie and Millo 2003, Muniesa, Millo, and Callon 2007, Muniesa 2014] —“objective” categorizations of quality. This capacity to produce “objective” quality valuations, as opposed to “subjective” assessments of school performance based on value judgements, was what imbued the SOM with “value” as a market regulation device—a capacity that was in turn grounded in a set of quantification rules and procedures of “mechanical objectivity” [Porter 1996]
Summary
SINCE NE OLIBERALISM took root, market mechanisms have encroached on the organization of policy fields for the provision of public. 1–42—0003-9756/20/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per page ã European Journal of Sociology 2021.
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