La neovalutazione al governo della società / Neoevaluation at the Government of Society

Abstract

Over the last three decades the rise of neoliberalism has been coupled with the rapid proliferation of a «new spirit of evaluation» (Barats et al. 2018), made up of rankings, ratings, and techniques aimed to measure every aspect of human life. By adopting a critical/cultural approach, we maintain that these evaluative practices, rather than being seen just as technical and neutral tools to improve individual, organizational and state performances, should be instead conceived as the ritual manifestation of truth (the “alethurgy”, to put it in Foucault’s words) of the current «managerial mode of domination» (Boltanski 2014). By steering our behaviour at a distance, «metric power» (Beer 2016) governs our life and erodes space for critics. In light of this, we regard neoevaluation as the specific rationality of the «new spirit of capitalism» (Boltanski and Chiapello 2014). Hence, we propose the foundation of a new research field in social and political science – that we suggest to name “Critical Evaluation Studies” – which finds a first contribution in this monographic issue.

Keywords:
Critical Evaluation Studies, Metric Power, Neoliberalism, Alethurgy, Power Knowledge