Knowledge actors and the construction of new governing panoramas:The case of the European Commission’s DG Education and Culture

RESUMO: Este artigo aborda o tema da governança da educação na Europa. Esse espaço da política tem sido dominado por grandes interesses e organizações transnacionais, entre as quais se destacam a Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE) e a Comissão Europeia (CE). Este artigo procura explorar e explicar quais são os efeitos constitutivos que as práticas sistemáticas de 'medição' e de estandardização têm na intensificação da convergência entre a Direção-Geral de Educação e Cultura da CE e a OCDE, a qual, por meio do PISA e de outros testes internacionais, tornou-se um ator influente na política educativa em uma escala global. O artigo pretende identificar os feitos do 'governo pelos números' nas interdependências criadas entre as duas organizações internacionais

A ‘Good, Average Man’: Calculation and the Limits of Statistics in Enrolling Insurance Customers

Drawing upon the historical relationship between statistics, probabilistic reasoning and life insurance, the article argues that mathematical calculation played a necessary but limited role in making markets for life insurance. Insuring publics have been fairly consistently cautious in the use of probabilistic and statistical reasoning to inform investment in life insurance. In this they follow a pattern set by early insurance companies who themselves were slow to alter their commercial practices in line with emerging knowledge. I examine some of the reasons for this glacial pace and some of the ambiguities on which statistical ‘certainties’ were built as part of an argument that the role of statistics and mathematics in market calculation is both less and more than it seems. This is manifest in the history of industrial life assurance, an industry with a phenomenally successful track record in the mass enrolment of consumers. Unlike their predecessors, industrial companies disdained swamping their target markets with probabilistic arguments in favour of a very different sort of argument that, nevertheless, carried a trace of statistical thinking with it. This trace came in the form of ‘good, average men’, the agents who became industrial insurance’s core marketing device and who translated the essentials of a statistically informed product into a more palatable, more calculable form

Programming subjects in the regime of anticipation:software studies and subjectivity

It has been argued that we increasingly live in a regime of anticipation in which likelihoods and probabilistic outcomes prevail. Many settings, ranging across finance, social media, biomedical science and military planning, rely on a semi-automated form of statistics – sometimes called ‘machine learning’ – to generate the predictions on which anticipation relies. Anticipation takes hold as these settings incorporate predictivity focused on the attributes of populations and individuals. What kinds of subjects live in the regime of anticipation? Shifts in predictive practice directly index the re-shaping of subjectivity in anticipation. Exploring the use of machine learning in social media, this article examines predictive practice of anticipation. It shows how software developers and programmers not only become agents of anticipation, but also internalise regimes of anticipation through technical practices. Shifts in programming practice hint at what it is like to be an agent of anticipation