Incentivization: From the current proliferation to the (re)problematization of incentives

Abstract

Incentives are so widespread and seemingly so insignificant that we might simply take them at face value and fail to ask how we can account for their emergence and proliferation. Building upon Foucault's notion of 'problematization' as a mode of reading history, this paper questions the taken-for-granted place that incentives have come to acquire in our current reflections and practices. To do so, it returns to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when American mechanical engineers and social scientists turned the behaviour of factory workers into a managerial problem and began to design new instruments to incentivize them. The shift from the current proliferation of incentives to their past opens up a genealogical space that invites us to explore the contingent shifts in meaning and use of incentivization as a framework to understand and govern human behaviour over the course of the twentieth century. Such a shift opens up an analytical space too. The return to early instances of incentivization allows us to compare labour incentives with labour discipline and to tease out some of the similarities

Beyond (and Alongside) Shameful Attachments: The Lived Experience of Critique Within the Entrepreneurial University

“…I think that academics here don't see that in other countries, you don't receive money for publications. Following Dix's (2020) work on incentivization, this economizing mode of boosting knowledge as productivity is to be understood as a taken-for-granted technology that positions knowledge as a site of management. As a corollary, this is also a way of wielding power over and through academics' epistemic experiences and agency.…”