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This book examines the powerful and intensifying role that metrics play in ordering and shaping our everyday lives. Focusing upon the interconnections between measurement, circulation and possibility, the author explores the interwoven relations between power and metrics. He draws upon a wide-range of interdisciplinary resources to place these metrics within their broader historical, political and social contexts. More specifically, he illuminates the various ways that metrics implicate our lives - from our work, to our consumption and our leisure, through to our bodily routines and the financial and organisational structures that surround us. Unravelling the power dynamics that underpin and reside within the so-called big data revolution, he develops the central concept of Metric Power along with a set of conceptual resources for thinking critically about the powerful role played by metrics in the social world today.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Introducing metric power.- Chapter 2. Measurement.- Chapter 3. Circulation.- Chapter 4. Possibility.- Chapter 5. Conclusion: The intersections and imbrications of metric power.- Chapter 6. Coda... Metric power and the production of uncertainty.(how does metric power make us feel?)
About the author
David Beer is Reader in Sociology at the University of York, UK.
Summary
This book examines the powerful and intensifying role that metrics play in ordering and shaping our everyday lives.
Additional text
“The book offers an extensive and well-referenced account of how metrics have begun to infiltrate social and cultural life. It is a text that will be widely used and discussed and its ideas displayed on whiteboards in classrooms across the world … Beer’s book expands the concept of measurement across a set of literatures in cultural studies, sociology and philosophy. Indeed, what very quickly stands out about this book is the breadth of literature it covers in these areas.” (Phoebe V. Moore, Information, Communication & Society, February, 2018)
“David Beer … outlines the rise of the metric and the role of metrics in shaping everyday life. … the book makes important reading for anyone concerned with how our daily experiences of technologies, organisations, and social institutions, are shaped, unequally, by the power of metrics.” (Dave O'Brien, New Books network, newbooksnetwork.com, August, 2017)
