From Quality, Not Quantity to Quality, as Quantity: Making the ‘Care Economy’ Valuable

Zachary Griffen, NYU

At a time when seemingly every aspect of social life is being subjected to quantification in one way or another, ‘quality, not quantity’ remains an omnipresent aphorism. Scholars have meticulously documented both a wide array of quantification processes and their effects, as well as ‘economies of qualities’ wherein goods and services become uniquely valuable through processes of ‘singularization.’ Using examples drawn from the history of US education and healthcare policy, this paper describes the quantification of quality. As ‘cost disease’ has plagued services in the so-called ‘care economy,’ organizations have called upon experts to measure a multitude of qualities. Teachers, physicians, schools, and hospitals have all come in for the quality measurement treatment, with a dizzying variety of metrics spawned to promote ‘accountability’ (in education) or ‘quality improvement’ (in healthcare). I trace how quality itself became quantifiable for statistical experts, spurred along by organizations such as the RAND Corporation, ultimately becoming legible to state agencies such as the Institute of Education Sciences and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Making quality measurable serves as both disciplinary technique and to instantiate services as economically valuable, an unending process that is continuously undermined by the impossibility of fully accounting for the scope of a welfare state in flux.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 145. Scientific Innovation and Development: Whence and Whither the State?