Page - 48 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

Algorithmic social ordering. Towards a conceptual framework EYERT, Florian, IRGMAIER, Florian, ULBRICHT, Lena Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Germany Introduction As the possibilities of digital technology continue to expand, its advance into more and more parts of everyday life and societal organization seems to assume a new quality. Increasingly, automatic information and decision-making systems are used to structure social processes, replace human judgement and generate order, as captured in the concepts of “algorithmic management” (Lee et al. 2015), “algorithmic regulation” (Yeung 2017a), “algocracy” (Aneesh 2009) and “governance by algorithms” (Just & Latzer 2017). It seems that governance and management is becoming more granular, subtle, responsive, encompassing and networked. Given the enormous possible consequences, we aim to contribute to a systematic understanding of these developments by analysing them from a particular conceptual perspective: the intersection of regulation and quantification. Our general approach is shaped by the question of social order and the mechanisms of its establishment and perpetuation. In the social sciences this foundational problem usually refers to societies in general, as in Hobbes’s political thought and its sociological interpretation by Talcott Parsons (1966), but it is also central for processes at the micro- and meso-level. Following Berger and Luckmann, we stress that social order is “an ongoing human production” (Berger & Luckmann 1991, 69), and propose to analyse the current societal transformations from the perspective of regulation as a specific form of such social ordering. With Julia Black, we understand regulation as “the sustained and focused attempt to alter the behaviour of others according to defined standards or purposes with the intention of producing a broadly identified outcome [...].” (Black 2002, 26) It is set apart from other forms of social ordering in four main dimensions. Unlike tradition or the habitus, it is intentional. Unlike spontaneous acts of violence, its perspective is one of permanence. Unlike government, it includes a variety of actors beyond the state. And unlike Weber’s domination, it is analytically independent of legitimacy. We believe that by developing a clear conceptual understanding of regulation and its technological components, we will be able to track the implications of the digital transformation for regulation and social ordering more generally. Informed by cybernetics, Christopher Hood, Henry Rothstein and Robert Baldwin (2001) have developed such an analytical framework for regulation, dissecting it into three components: information gathering, standard setting, and behaviour modification. In order to address the problems at hand, we draw on and aim to contribute to three main strands of literature. The sociology of quantification, valuation and classification has recently gained importance due to a an expansion of rankings, ratings and scores. It discusses the causes and consequences of the growing reliance on numbers in all parts of society. By transforming a continuous reality into a discrete representation, quantification promises to render human affairs increasingly commensurable and calculable, thereby increasing possibilities for control (Mau 2017). But while some authors have emphasized the role of digital technology in this process, until now we lack an understanding both of the concrete technological logic and the broader social implications of these processes. Supported by the spread of ever more powerful computer 48