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Technologies of ironic revelation: enacting consumers in neuromarkets Neuroscience is increasingly considered as a possible basis for new business and management practices. A prominent example of this trend is neuromarketing-a relatively new form of market and consumer research that applies neuroscience to marketing by employing brain imaging or measurement technology to anticipate consumers' response to, for instance, products, packaging or advertising. In this paper we draw attention to the ways in which certain neuromarketing technologies simultaneously reveal and enact a particular version of the consumer. The revelation is ironic in the sense that it entails the construction of a contrast between what appears to be the case-consumers' accounts of why they prefer certain products over others-and what can be shown to be the case as a result of the application of the technology-the hidden or concealed truth. This contrast structure characterises much of the academic and popular literature on neuromarketing, and helps explain the distribution of accountability relations associated with assessments of its effectiveness.

This research note proposes that it is instructive to ask what happens when evaluative practices go wrong. It shows how a close study of mistakes and mishaps in evaluation - both in the process of their disclosure and subsequent management - provides important insights into ways in which evaluation practices contribute to performing and sustaining the relations of accountability involved. The note examines two cases: 1) the mistaken award of the 2017 Oscar for Best Picture and 2) the incident in November 2016 when Thomson Reuters notified a large number of scholars that they had been awarded the distinction of being a “Highly Cited Researcher” in their field, only a few hours later to retract these awards. Studying such instances provides insights into what is at stake for participants, the choreography of performing and revealing evaluations, the ways in which different evaluation practices fold together, and the accountability structures which support valuation practices.

Chalk in hand, his formulas expressed themselves, it seems, more easily on the board than they were able to with pen in his notebooks, for in his listeners' presence his fecund genius found again a new zeal, and a ray of joy illuminated the lines of his face when the proof he sought to render understandable struck his audience with obviousness. 1 So recounts an admiring biographer the pedagogical exploits of Augustin-Louis Cauchy, a towering figure of early nineteenth-century mathematics. Cauchy was trained and then taught at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique, a school for military engineers that not long before Cauchy's matriculation became one of the first to make systematic use of a new mode of advanced mathematical instruction: lessons at a blackboard. Today, chalk and blackboards are ubiquitous in mathematics education and research. Chalk figures prominently in the imaginations and daily routines of most mathematicians.