Supping with the Devil? Indicators and the rise of managerial rationality in law

Abstract

Managerial devices are rapidly developing as a means for driving the legal performance of organisations, including those of states and corporations. This paper explores the managerial rationality underpinning global legal indicators, and the constraints they convey on institutional behaviour. In particular, it argues that indicators are better understood as part of a system of management control and distributed governance, which is steadily eroding state-centred forms of authority, including state law. In this context, legitimacy and reactivity are contingent to their cycle of production and implementation, which is fourfold: data-collecting, benchmarking, auditing and allocating incentives. Each process is meant to generate respectively subjectification, self-knowledge by comparison, accountability and stimulus for action. Indicators with higher degrees of legitimacy become entrenched in institutional practices and legal decision-making processes. The paper concludes that regulatory spaces where indicators unfold need critical and political scrutiny to expose their pernicious effects, undesirable uses and inevitable misuses.

Law-jobs in the algorithmic society

“…From this perspective, when the relevant social actors identified as founders, entrepreneurs and architects of the algorithmic society promote the development of magna cartas, Supreme Courts, algorithmic systems and regulation, we may acknowledge the emergence of new legal phenomena in the cyberspace, social networks and virtual realities (Fortes et al, 2022). We also consider the existence of a mathematical turn in law, as mathematical formulas, quantitative methods and statistical analysis are currently a decisive part of what contemporary law is and the tasks performed by law-jobs in contemporary societies (Restrepo Amariles, 2015;2017a;2017b;Fortes, 2015;Restrepo Amariles and McLachlan, 2017).…”

Differentiating and connecting indicators: the quality and performance of law in the World Bank's Doing Business Project

“…Sociologists have long been interested in understanding how international organisations (IOs) create global norms of law, diffuse model laws to different nations and shape their national policies (Halliday and Carruthers, 2007; Carruthers and Halliday, 1998; Halliday and Osinsky, 2006; Chorev, 2005; Babb, 2013; Meyer et al , 1997; Dobbin et al ., 2007; Bennett, 1991; Henisz et al ., 2005; Twining, 2005). Transnational legal indicators (TLIs) produced by the IOs play an important role in this process (Davis et al ., 2012a; Davis, 2014; Merry et al ., 2015; Amariles, 2015; 2017; Amariles and Mclachlan, 2018; Siems and Nelken, 2017; Frydman, 2017). The TLIs turn the complex and abstract features of legal rules and systems into quantitatively expressed scores, which allow the IOs to compare, rank and order legal systems according to their conduciveness to economic development.…”

“…TLIs are those indicators that have ‘a global ambition’ to govern the legal systems of sovereign states (Siems and Nelken, 2017). They comprise ‘measures, standards and rankings of the quality of law and legal institutions across the entire world, particular regions, or selected jurisdictions’ (Amariles, 2017, p. 466).…”