The Changing Lives of Measures and Values: From Centre Stage in the Fading ‘Disciplinary’ Society to Pervasive Background Instrument in the Emergent ‘Control’ Society

Abstract

This paper examines the work that measures and values do in policy in the context of an epochal change in the relations between knowledge and policy in Australia. I tell a story of successive attempts to rehabilitate a dying Australian river. The first attempt employs policy as the application of theoretically justified natural knowledge about rivers and their environs. The second attempt occurs after the evidence-based policy era has dawned in Australia. The contrast shows that measures, values and facts about the dying river justified by epistemic practices have been displaced. In an era of evidence-based policy and governance through market mechanisms, measures and values speak to policy through designs that can be bought and sold. In order to be able to better describe this shift I develop an analytic vocabulary to give an account of the intensive properties of what I call enumerated entities, and link the shift to the move from a disciplinary to a control society.

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