Day Seventeen: Institutional Incentives

SDS 237: Data Ethnography

Lindsay Poirier

Take some time to free write on where your heart is at, and what energy you are bringing into class today.

Turn to a neighbor and discuss:

• What are some things you are doing or would like to do to navigate an emotionally charged time?

Reading Discussion

Audit Culture

• Cultural shift often understood to emerge/expand around the 1990s
• Reliance on metrics to measure and rank performance
• Reliance on metrics to monitor and oversee individuals/institutions
• Redefines what accountability and governance mean

Example: NYC CompStat

• Crime reduction strategy instituted in NYC in the 1990s
• Used crime and deployment data as performance metrics
• Officers penalized for failing to reduce crimes

Example: Toxic Release Inventory

• US industrial facilities required to report amounts of toxic emissions they release into environment or transfer off-site
• Used to environmental burdens and injustices
• Used in journalism, activism, and legal proceedings

Metric Fixation

• Tendencies to focus more on improving numbers than on actual performance/change
• Can incentivize individuals to engage in practices contrary to their goals
  • “Teaching to the test”
  • Surgeons not taking risky cases
• Can incentivize individuals to engage in deceptive reporting
  • Juking the Stats
  • Cooking the Books
  • Phantom Emissions

How should we understand the role of the individual vs. the institution when it comes to metric fixation?