Business Education and Anxiety in the Performance of Value

Business education epitomizes the cultural complex that situates performance (understood both as the intensification of valuation and as the spectacle of decision) at the center of social life. The experiential training technique known as the case method, famously recognizable as a Harvard Business School product, carries in particular a series of meanings that are central to the formation of the ideals of performance, adventure, effectiveness, and aplomb that distinguish business education today. It also conveys, however, elements of anxiety that are characteristic of the notion of the real that is actioned in such a setting. This hypothesis is explored here through an examination of early and contemporary aspects of the case method at the Harvard Business School, in particular in the financial valuation curriculum. It is suggested that the performative features of the case method, widely understood, concur with an exacerbation of the troubling aspects of the “performance complex.”

Performing Numbers

This chapter explores the implications of performance metrics as a source of self-knowledge and self-presentation. It does so through the figure of the contemporary musician. As performers on-stage and online, musicians are constantly assessed and evaluated by industry actors, peers, music fans, and themselves. The impact of powerful modes of quantification on personal experiences, understandings, and practices of artistic creation provides insight into the wider role that metrics play in shaping how we see ourselves and others; and how we present ourselves to others. Through in-depth interviews with emerging musicians, this chapter thus uses the artist as a lens through which to understand everyday life within the “performance complex.”

Weathering Winner-Take-All

Over the last decade, the global sex industry has been radically transformed by the rise of webcam sex platforms. This chapter shows how rankings are constitutive of competition in this new, emerging part of the sex industry. The ranking algorithms are highly contested among performers, in particular because of their opaque nature and the strong winner-take-all dynamics which they propel. Creating deep uncertainty and anxiety among performers, the algorithms are widely seen as unfair. However, the wider assemblage of market devices constituted by webcam sex platforms enable performers to circumvent the rankings at least to some degree. Moreover, on discussion forums where performers negotiate strategies to make a living, they actively share experiences of algorithms on competing platforms, discuss which algorithm suits their interests best, and consider vacating to rival platforms. Indeed, how market competition is organized within platforms, is constrained by competition between platforms.

Crowdsourcing Before the Smartphone

Created by New York lawyers Tim and Nina Zagat in 1979, the Zagat Restaurant Survey brought computer-powered statistical methods and an avowedly egalitarian ideology to restaurant criticism. The Zagats synthesized numerical ratings and narrative reviews from amateur food lovers into paragraph-length listings, eventually selling millions of slim burgundy guidebooks annually for cities around the Global North. The Survey allowed a classed cohort of power users to shape urban environments with their collective judgments, meeting a widespread desire for more extensive information on upscale consumption spaces as the rhythms of professional and social life were changing drastically for highly educated workers. The Zagat Survey was both a class strategy by an emerging professional cohort to assert their dominance over the cultural and built environment in New York City, and a prototypical location-based service (LBS), pioneering many of the features assumed to be inherent to Web 2.0 networked applications.

Classical Music Competitions as Complex Performances

This chapter presents a cultural approach to studying competitions that involves conceptualizing competitions as performative events where individuals and collectivities present and negotiate meanings. In the first part of the chapter, the promise of this approach is illustrated through an analysis of international competitions in classical music. It presents four arguments concerning the wider cultural significance and interactional structure of music competitions which result from interpreting them as complex performances. The second part of the chapter explores how these arguments could be extended by considering the political, educational, media, and vocational context surrounding international classical music competitions. The final part of the chapter suggests directions for future research by outlining a systematic comparison of competitions across the arts and beyond.

What Are Digital Reputation Measures Worth?

The notion of digital reputation was a salient feature of the rise of social media during the period from 2005 to 2012. Supported by a convergent set of discourses, interests, and devices, the ambition that fueled the development of the social web was to reflect the circulation of influence by considering that each node of the social network (i.e. the “digital identities” that appear on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages) had a different reputation and that these differences could be measured. The aim of this chapter is to review this promise ten years later. Reputation metrics have appeared so contextual, relational, and manipulable that it has not been possible to provide interpretive conventions that are sufficiently stable to coordinate and redefine activities. E-reputation is thus local and defies any standardization. When faced with the multiple uncertainties encountered by fragile reputation measures, service designers tend increasingly to neglect this mode of valuation in favor of popularity and personalized prediction.

Formalized Evaluation

This chapter analyzes rankings as a powerful, formal mode of evaluation. After raising a series of questions that are important for understanding evaluation more broadly, it illustrates their generative effects by applying them to rankings. In doing so it emphasizes the importance of neo-liberalism as the context for rankings, the distinctive cognitive relationships that rankings produce, the expertise that they challenge, their relationship to markets, and their effects on those who live with their judgments. It concludes by suggesting that such formal modes of evaluation represent a quest to limit the uncertainty and ambiguity that humans face.

Competition and Consecration in the World Press Photo Awards

This chapter focuses on the World Press Photo, a non-profit organization which organizes the largest and arguably most prestigious press photo competition in the world, yearly awarding dozens of prizes, which work as crucial institutional mechanisms of production and circulation of cultural value. Awards are relevant within such scarcely institutionalized fields as photojournalism, since they can raise value problems for jurors, winners, and observers. It is the whole vision of the cultural field—its meanings, values, and indeed objects—that is at stake in prizing. In the digital age, competitions and awards do not just reveal how news photographs are evaluated, but also what a digital news photograph actually is, or at least what nowadays it is legitimately supposed to be. This chapter mainly draws on an archival analysis of the last twenty years of the WPP awards and in-depth interviews with jurors, experts, and winning photojournalists.

Pick the Winner, So You Can Then Choose the Reasons

Studying architecture competitions from the perspective of valuation puts the formally designated valuators, i.e. the competition jury, into focus. The jury performs the dual task of evaluating the submitted design proposals and appointing the winner. Competitions are presumed to produce fair winners by first rating (evaluating) the design proposals and then ranking them (appointing the winner). Ethnographic studies of juries in action suggest that rating and ranking are performed, but in the reverse order. The winning design proposal sets the standards against which all proposals are understood and evaluated. This chapter develops the rationale for this counterintuitive, controversial practice. The nature of architectural design work and the jury’s task make the observed practice appear less a matter of choice than of necessity. Even when, occasionally, the practice becomes publicly known, picking the right winner seems more important than the legitimacy of the processes producing such winners.

Merit, Morality, and Market

China’s “Social Credit System” is an audacious national endeavor to collect, digitize, and share data on hundreds of millions of people to generate an automated system of rewards and punishment. Its spirit of social control and merit-based social organization shows how market-based systems of sorting, rewarding, and punishing consumers are being recombined with state-led attempts to organize society. This chapter asks what this experiment with social control tells us about the regimes of performance, valuation, and competition that this volume shows emerging in the West, and about China’s forty years of “Reform and Opening.” It examines how the Social Credit System emerged as a techno-utopian response to the interrelated challenges of productivity, trust, and population control, and how the state uses extensive policy experimentation to realize its goal of combining financial credit extension with social behavior modification in pursuit of the “right” balance between merit, morality, and the market.