The last (and first) piece of the puzzle

This chapter concludes the analysis of the three basic paradigms of the new technocracy by looking in more detail at the search for scientific results and evidence in public policy, conducted under the broader label of performance management. Historically, performance management has been developed through a steady accumulation of concepts, practices and standards such as quality management, management by numbers, evidence-based policy, evaluation practices, auditing and inspection. The common denominator, however, is a fundamental commitment to improve public policies through measurement of effects in ways that make it possible to confer the status of quantifiable and objective evidence on these effects more or less directly. The core idea of performance management is thus to make the policy process part of, and ideally identical to, the scientific process of discovery. As such, the chapter tackles what is often considered the first and last dimension of technocracy more directly: governmental scientism and the preoccupation with quantification, measurement and objective evidence as the foundation of political authority and effective social engineering.

This focus comes with a particular challenge: given the historical constancy of governmental scientism in technocratic rule, what is then new about the new technocracy in this respect? Whereas the paradigms of network organization and reflexive risk regulation introduce rather clear shifts and reversals in technocratic rationality and practice, the current attempt to provide a scientific basis for public policy through performance management seems rather to confirm the idea of eternally recurring Saint-Simonism: the claim that technocracy has remained largely unchanged since its initial conception. This degree of historical permanence is certainly part of the equation when it comes to performance management. As much as I would like to list more decisive events of the 1980s in the spirit of the two preceding chapters, such an exercise would not make much sense. If anything, this would be where the interpretation of the 1980s as the decisive decade in the rise of neoliberal hegemony becomes relevant, at least when it comes to the question of the econocracy and the influence of economic knowledge and expertise on public policy.