Quantification and statistics have long served as instruments of governance and state power. However, in recent decades new systems of measurement and rankings have emerged that operate both beyond and below the nation‐state. Using contemporary examples, we explore how international measurements, rankings, risk management and audit are creating new forms of global governmentality. We ask, who – or what – is driving the spread of audit technologies and why have indicators and rankings become a populist project? How should we theorise the rise of measuring, ranking and auditing and their political effects? What are the impacts of these ever‐more pervasive systems on organisational behaviour and professional life?

A ‘good’ ethical review

Audit and professionalism in research ethics

Rachel Douglas‐Jones

How does one conduct, measure and record a ‘good’ ethical review of biomedical research? To what extent do ethics committees invoke professionalism in researchers and in themselves, and to what extent do they see competence as adherence to a set of standard operating procedures for ethical review? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Forum of Ethics Review Committees of Asia and the Pacific (FERCAP), a capacity‐building NGO that runs ethics committee trainings and reviews in the Asia Pacific region, I develop an analysis of ethical review and its effects. I focus on a ‘second‐order audit’ run by FERCAP, which recognises committees according to a set of standards that are designed to render ‘local’ committees internationally legible. The article adds to a growing comparative literature that expands studies of audit‐like measuring and disciplining activities beyond western contexts and enriches readings of ‘ethics’. I begin and end with a reflection on the ethical effects of a measurement practice that takes ethics itself as its object.

Transacting UNESCO World Heritage

Gifts and exchanges on a global stage

Lynn Meskell

With the burgeoning research into global heritage, particularly in the work of UNESCO, this paper discusses recent developments and implications of decisions taken by the World Heritage Committee in their implementation of the 1972 Convention. While the World Heritage programme is experiencing a fiscal crisis, significant challenges also stem from sovereign states, non‐governmental agencies and other actors. This paper argues that World Heritage decision‐making processes have transformed the inscription of sites into exchange values that mobilise ancillary effects in other domains driven by economic and political imperatives. The transactional nature of World Heritage is traced across three scales: the World Heritage process itself, the properties and the participants.

The normativity of numbers in practice

Technologies of counting, accounting and auditing in Malawi's civil service reform

Gerhard Anders

Contemporary technologies of governing employed in international development rely on the normativity of numbers, and their use of numbers and collection, as conditions for financial support by international financial institutions. This article examines how the normativity of numbers worked in practice during the implementation of civil service reform in Malawi. It reveals a contradiction between the lofty rhetoric of greater efficiency and transparency achieved through the introduction of new technologies and the messy realities of everyday bureaucratic practices, corruption and haphazard implementation.

Comment

The audit juggernaut

Steven Sampson

‘Character matters'

How do measures of non‐cognitive skills shape understandings of social mobility in the global North and South?

Laura Camfield

This paper highlights growing interest in measures of non‐cognitive skills that are shaping debate on poverty and social mobility in the global North and South. I use examples from an entrepreneurship programme in South Africa and the ‘Character and Resilience manifesto' in the UK to argue that non‐cognitive skills are being incorporated in a narrative of the shortcomings of ‘the poor'. The characteristics of the poor, or their ‘non‐cognitive skills', are measured in ways that are ethnocentric and insensitive to class. The results of these measurements are presented as an explanation of their poverty, drawing attention away from the political and economic systems in which they are embedded.

Commentary

The ranking explosion

Paul Robert Gilbert

Managing preschool the Lean way. Evaluating work processes by numbers and colours

Renita Thedvall

The management model Lean, originating from the car industry, has in recent years spread like wildfire in the public sector. One important component in the model is to set targets that are measurable to show results, visualising how taxpayers' money is used. The article examines how Swedish public‐sector preschool staff handle evaluative techniques in the form of numbers and colours within the Lean model. The article shows their eagerness to comply with the ethics of evaluation, while at the same time resisting what they understand as hard‐core statistics by, for example, introducing monitoring that includes feelings and experiences.

Editors’ goodbye

David BerlinerMark Maguire