“La donnée n’est pas un donné”: Statistics, Quantification and Democratic Choice

Abstract

This article investigates the transformation of employment policies in France, Germany, the UK and at European level, problematizing their shift towards governance-driven quantification, which has at its core the quest for efficiency putting equivalence between more and better, and having more for less. Numbers become both targets and evaluators leading to rational optimization of the data produced. This calls democracy into question. Citizens have no say in how they are accounted for. Employment takes on a very different meaning encompassing any job, regardless of wage, working conditions, or contract type. Social criticism movements face the task to produce alternative data relying on democratized procedures and justice expectations. Such data, capable of legitimately counteracting governance-driven quantification, would support another “understanding” of the collective issue at hand.