Assembling Calculative Infrastructures

Abstract

Much has been made of economising. Yet social scientists have paid little attention to the moment of economic failure, the moments that precede it, and the calculative infrastructures and related processes through which both failing and failure are made operable. This chapter examines the shift from the economising of the market economy, which took place across much of the nineteenth century, to the economising and marketising of the social sphere, which is still ongoing. We consider a specific case of the economising of failure, namely the repeated attempts over more than a decade to create a failure regime for NHS hospitals. These attempts commenced with the Health and Social Care Act 2003, which drew explicitly on the Insolvency Act 1986. This promised a 'failure regime' for NHS Foundation Trusts modelled on the corporate sector. Shortly after the financial crash, and in the middle of one of the biggest scandals to face NHS hospitals, these proposals were abandoned in favour of a regime based initially on the notion of 'de-authorisation'. The notion of de-authorisation was then itself abandoned, in favour of the notion of 'unsustainable provider', most recently called also the Trust Special Administrators regime.We suggest that these repeated attempts to devise a failure regime for NHS hospitals have lessons that go beyond the domain of healthcare, and that they highlight important issues concerning the role that 'exit' models and associated calculative infrastructures may play in the economising and regulating of public services and the social sphere more broadly.

Tacit coordination as a background practice to accounting practices – reflections on Vollmer’s case for a sociological super-theory of accounting

“…Yet others arise out of combinations of material arrangements that were intended but perhaps not exactly in the combinations that would eventually materialise. Where practices of tacit coordination, and perhaps especially dispersed ones, form practice arrangement bundles with factories, production flows, etc., it becomes possible to see the similarities with infrastructures (Kornberger et al , 2017; Kurunmäki et al , 2019; Power, 2015). The physicality of factories and machines can here be complemented with, or stand in contrast to, layers of accounting and performance measurement and management systems (Cooper et al , 2019).…”

“…I then elaborate on what is at stake in conceiving of tacit coordination as practices and focus on three key insights to which such a conception gives rise. These are that tacitness should be thought of as actively created, that Schatzki’s (2002) for determinants of practices (general knowledge, practical know-how, rules, teleoaffectivity) can be very useful for explicating the nature of tacitness and that we should expect tacitness to materialise in layered infrastructures (Kurunmäki et al , 2019; Power, 2015). I conclude with some speculations on the potential of Vollmer’s approach for becoming a new stream of practice research.…”

Banking on alternative credit scores: Auditing the calculative infrastructure of U.S. consumer lending

“…As a subcategory of financial infrastructure, calculative infrastructures “designate the relatively stabilized chain of accounting calculations and associated narratives, the ensemble of calculative technologies, and rationales that have come to appear necessary” ​​(Kurunmäki and Miller, 2013: 1101) in the governance of quantified life (Mennicken and Miller, 2012). In that vein, calculative infrastructure has been used to understand the economization of failure (Kurunmäki and Miller, 2013; Kurunmäki et al, 2019), particularly in relation to corporate and healthcare systems (Juven, 2019; Reilley and Scheytt, 2019) as the ability to forecast risk and index failure has become a defining feature of business operations. Thus, calculative infrastructure is defined as the tools, techniques, and infrastructures built to manage and economize risk.…”