Commensuration and styles of reasoning: Venice, cost–benefit, and the defence of place

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Abstract

This paper discusses some preconditions for “making things the same” by means of quantification and economic calculation. It examines a controversial cost–benefit analysis, conducted as part of the environmental appraisal of a large public sector project in Italy: the long-debated scheme for flood protection in Venice. By tracing the different “styles of calculation” that characterised the economic and environmental appraisal of the project, the paper analyses the inter-relationship between economic representations of the urban and natural environment, its political symbolism, and various attempts to intervene upon it. It follows how the objectivity of numbers is debated, stabilised or disrupted, as differing appeals to realism and accuracy are advanced in the context of different modes of intervention and practical aims. The paper shows that the “commensuration” and “standardisation” that numbers can bring about rest on how the object of calculation as well as, crucially, its subject are represented and conceived.

Introduction

Very large and visible projects such as the one considered here – the highly controversial system of mobile barriers for flood defence in Venice – give rise to epistemological wars as well as political ones. Disputes are inevitably mediated by expert knowledge seeking to produce “objective” representations in order to “tame” the conflicting subjectivities involved. Numbers, like the cost–benefit ratios examined in what follows, are turned to in attempts to “standardise” decisions (Porter, 1992, Rose, 1991). The resulting numbers can make decisions appear to descend from a neutral, impersonal and calculative logic, rather than from subjective judgement. Numbers provide a sort of “metacode”, a “universal code that appears to be comprehensible in all frames of reference” (Rottenburg, 2009, p. xxix). Once backed up by calculation, decisions are perceived as replicable and independent of the people taking them. The subject of the decision is thus “standardised”, made impersonal. And so is its object: numbers represent reality in a universal format which allows it to circulate and be further calculated and formatted. Through numbers, specific places are turned into abstract calculable spaces, which can be compared, ranked, variously organised and governed “from a distance” (Latour, 1987, Miller, 1992, Preston, 2006, Robson, 1992, Rose and Miller, 1992).

Yet the extent to which numbers can objectify and standardise the world, the degree to which calculative tools can achieve authority, and the more general roles of accounting and economic calculation in mediating certain modes of governance are things that shift over time and across institutional domains (Burchell et al., 1985, Hopwood, 1987, Hopwood, 1992, Miller, 1998, Miller and Napier, 1993, Porter, 1995b). Porter speaks of “information cultures” to indicate that the prevalence of quantification in government has to be analysed in relation to the specific values and aspirations attached to numbers and quantitative methods, and that these should not be presupposed as universal or invariant (Porter, 1995a). Along similar lines, Power observes that forms of economic calculation can emerge in relation to a variety of “problems of objectivity” which do not univocally correspond to a given, monolithic and overbearing market culture or scientistic culture (Power, 1996).

Despite recognising that accounting’s role in socio-economic governance is a contingent and shifting phenomenon, research has not yet paid systematic attention to this variability. As recently noted, research in the field of social and institutional accounting studies has not yet “come up with sustained investigations exploring […] interrelations between theories and models of accounting and finance, the enactment of those relations, and their formation and reformation, in diverse settings and cultures of calculation” (Vollmer, Mennicken, & Preda, 2009, p. 627).

Accounting and economic calculation have been described as being at the core of a process of cultural rationalisation happening at world level (Drori et al., 2006, Meyer, 1986b, Meyer et al., 1997). Yet, despite the universalistic ambition of such cultural rationalisation, it is not replicated uniformly and universally (Cooper et al., 1998, Czarniawska and Sevón, 1996, Lounsbury, 2008, Mennicken, 2008). This is so not only because different local traditions exist and persist, but also because such cultural rationalisation is anything but a monolithic and invariant process. Rather, it is a phenomenon whose generality, and the very conditions for such generality, need to be reconstructed by investigating it in its articulation and internal variety. Even if quantification and economic calculation tend to be appealed to (or resisted) everywhere in the name of values such as transparency, democracy, objectivity, scientificity, or rationality, the ways in which such values are interpreted and conveyed through numbers are contingent and context-specific (Fourcade, 2011). Such contingency and specificity need to be addressed if one is to reconstruct the conditions underlying the rise and spread of accounting and economic calculation. Exploring variations on the theme of how accounting and economic calculation become models of governance and organisation is crucial in order to understand the sources of their authority and appeal. One can thus “begin to explore the different ways in which accounting invents calculating selves and calculable spaces” (Miller, 1992, p. 64), including those situations in which such “invention” is resisted, counteracted and displaced (Espeland, 1998, p. 37).

This paper seeks to contribute to such agenda. It examines the conflicting approaches to the costing of flood damages which characterised the cost–benefit analysis of the flood protection scheme for Venice. The case-study provides the opportunity to analyse different calculative rationales as they emerge and clash, as well as the conditions for their emergence. It is a study of variability, in at least two senses. First, it is a study of how a supposedly standard calculative approach like cost–benefit analysis was followed in a specific territory and within specific discursive conditions which counteracted the commensuration and objectification which the technique was supposed to bring about. Second, it is a study of the encounter of different calculative rationales, of what happens at the crossroads of multiple “accountings” and calculative approaches when they are confronted with each other. As such, this paper re-examines the relationship between economic calculation and processes of standardisation and commensuration.

Porter’s work has addressed the relationship between quantification, objectivity and standardisation (Porter, 1992, Porter, 1995b, Porter, 1996). Porter links the rise of calculative tools like cost–benefit analysis to situations in which professional expertise is permeable to the questioning of challenging outsiders, when decisions must be defended by appealing to neutral and impersonal criteria rather than to subjective judgement and experience. The objectivity of numbers is equated with standardisation, a process whereby decisions are linked to replicable calculative methodologies which are seen to transcend individual subjectivity and deemed universally applicable (Porter, 1992). In this sense, numbers can support the aspiration to “escape from perspective” (Daston, 1992) and obtain a univocal, impersonal interpretation of the phenomena around which decisions come to be framed. They can become powerful symbols of social order – a precondition, rather than a consequence, for them standing also as symbols of truth. Seen as independent of individual perceptions and idiosyncratic interpretations and as “the bedrock of systematic knowledge”, “numbers have come to epitomize the modern fact” (Poovey, 1998, p. xii).

Espeland and Stevens use the notion of commensuration to indicate a specific form of standardisation, one that occurs through numbers as distinct from qualitative classes or categories. Commensuration is seen as the process whereby different qualities are measured with a single standard or unit, to derive a common metric through a series of aggregations (Espeland, 1998, Espeland, 2000, Espeland and Stevens, 1998). Through commensuration, “everyday experience, practical reasoning, and empathetic identification become an increasingly irrelevant basis for judgment as context is stripped away ad relationships become more abstractly represented by numbers” (Espeland, 1998, p. 25). In this way, Espeland notes, new links are forged between things previously separated, but at the same time distance is created by the mediation and abstraction imposed by numbers (1998, p. 28). New standardised objects – the aggregates constituted in the act of commensurating – are formed, and the meaning and value of the individual elements thus aggregated changes as a result. Commensuration “changes the locus and form of attention, both creating and obscuring relations among entities” (Espeland & Sauder, 2007, p. 16). Espeland and Stevens, like Porter, link commensuration to cultures which oppose “personal ties, elites or patriarchal relations” (1998, p. 321). Commensuration is seen as a way to reform institutional systems based on personal relationships and local knowledge in the name of impersonality and universality. Commensuration is linked to the pursuit of a “common interest” (Huault & Rainelli-Weiss, 2011).

Espeland and Stevens (1998) draw attention to some of the conditions underlying resistance to commensuration and claims of incommensurability. ”Incommensurables” are seen as likely to emerge at the margin between different institutional domains, where values and identities are in question. The two authors call for a more systematic investigation of commensuration and its limits across different institutional contexts: “We need to explain variation in what motivates people to commensurate, the forms they use to do so, commensuration’s practical and political effects, and how people resist commensuration” (Espeland & Stevens, 1998, p. 315). Huault and Rainelli-Weiss (2011) discuss the importance of cognitive differences in explaining failed attempts to commensurate. Drawing on the sociology of worth (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), they trace the different “orders of worth” underlying attempts to compromise between different risk metrics in the market for weather derivatives.

In the project appraisal analysed here, different approaches to the costing of flood damages emerged, reflecting different understandings of “objectivity” and varying degrees of belief in the possibility to “commensurate” and in the validity of the aggregate measures resulting from commensuration. Different numbers resulted from different ways of conceiving how the territory should be represented and inscribed in cost–benefit calculations. They offered different ways of understanding and “rendering visible” (Miller, 1990) the specific territory constituted by Venice and its lagoon – the object of calculation – and articulated different possibilities for intervening upon it. Borrowing from Jasanoff (2005), these different rationales and modes of representation will be described as: a “view from nowhere”, seeking to establish a universal and impersonal way to calculate costs and benefits; a “view from somewhere”, based on local knowledge and experience; and a “view from everywhere”, which tried to compromise between the latter and the former.

Following the history of science and statistics (Hacking, 2002, Schweber, 2006), the notion of “style” is proposed here to characterise these different calculative approaches. Hacking introduced the notion of “style of scientific reasoning” as part of a historical epistemology that seeks to investigate the conditions for the emergence of specific ways of knowing. Styles of reasoning are defined as the ways in which the possibility for truth and falsehood, and thus the contents of a certain body of knowledge, are constituted. The existence of various styles of reasoning does not imply, according to Hacking, that what is true under a certain style will necessarily be false under another. Rather, it simply implies that truth values can be established only by virtue of a certain style within which specific possibilities for truth and falsehood are created and others are excluded, and which thus “determine what counts as objectivity” (2002, pp. 160–161). Styles of reasoning settle the types of investigations through which certain notions of objectivity can be pursued.

The notion of “styles of calculation” is used here to highlight that differences in modes of economic calculation can be analysed in terms of the styles of reasoning underlying them. Tracing such styles, attending to the specific notions of objectivity they endorse, and examining the different possibilities they open up for representing a territory and its economy and for intervening upon them, helps us to make sense of the encounter and potential clash of different calculative approaches, such as those at play in the cost–benefit analysis studied here.

Hacking’s notion of styles does not transplant unproblematically to a public controversy like the one analysed here. Making it relevant for this study implies moving away from a historical epistemology that spans the whole history of science to address a specific controversy over the local application of a specific calculative approach – cost–benefit analysis – rather than examining the formation of altogether different bodies of knowledge and their conditions of emergence. None the less, the notion of style is considered helpful in at least two respects. First, it enables us to unpack the terms of the dispute beyond the mere identification of the conflicting interests at stake, of its winners and losers. It helps to trace the various rationales that those interests expressed, and which may have contributed to the formation of those interests in the first place. Disputes like the one analysed here are at once scientific and political, they testify to the impossibility of conceiving science and politics as autonomous domains. The conflicting calculations at play reflected both different ways of reasoning about the territory which encompassed deep-rooted cultural values, and explicit attempts to further or oppose specific projects and agendas for action. The sort of defence of place which sought to oppose the attempt to inscribe the territory in an ultimate cost–benefit ratio, this paper argues, was both symbolic and strategic, driven by beliefs and values as much as by an explicit attempt to counteract certain governmental interventions. Tracing different styles of reasoning behind conflicting numbers does not mean that an epistemological explanation of a controversy is favoured at the expense of a political-economic one. The notion of style simply enables us to see power and knowledge as mutually constitutive. It assumes neither that numbers are utterly biased and manipulated by prior interests which would exist independently of any knowledge of the problems at play, nor that economic stakes, political passions and cultural values are unable to permeate and shape knowledge production.

Second, Hacking’s notion of styles enables us to move beyond a rigid dualism between commensuration and claims to incommensurability, between colonising numbers and indigenous resistance to calculation. Public disputes involving contested expert evidence display more complexity than is conveyed by these alternatives; they exhibit the emergence of multiple ways of “making things the same” by means of economic calculation and display varying degrees of resistance to commensuration. Such disputes reflect not so much the encounter between a standardising and commensurating (western) rationality and a pristine “other” not yet colonised by calculation, such that one or the other will prevail; more often, they represent the very ways in which such rationality is continuously deconstructed and reconstructed from within (Meyer, 1986a).

The rest of this paper is organised as follows. After a short description of the research materials used, the paper provides an overview of the so-called “safeguard” of Venice and of the flood protection scheme for the city. The second part of the paper illustrates the appraisal of the scheme and the conflicting positions taken by its supporters – the Ministry for Public Works, its local branch the Water Magistrate, and the consortium of firms in charge of designing and building the project (the Consorzio Venezia Nuova) – and its opponents – the National Commission for Environmental Impact Assessment, the Municipality of Venice, and several civil society organisations (see Fig. 1). The third part of the paper traces the different “styles of reasoning” underlying the arguments and calculations offered by these different actors, and the different understandings of the object of calculation (Venice and its lagoon) they entailed. These different styles were never reconciled. The flood protection scheme for Venice was ultimately approved but its costs, benefits and environmental impacts were never agreed upon. As a decision rule to “tame” political conflict, as a way to seek impersonality and standardise the decision and its subject, cost–benefit analysis was ultimately defeated. The fourth section of the paper argues that such defeat was less the result of irreconcilable differences in styles of calculation and more the outcome of a specific way of conceptualising the subject of the decision – the state itself. The concluding section discusses the implications of the case for our understanding of the role of accounting and economic calculation as technologies that produce objectivity, commensuration and standardisation, and of the conditions and limits for the latter.

Section snippets

Note on methodology and materials

The materials used in this article consist of official documents collected between 2003 and 2008. These documents date from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, but a larger set was analysed in the course of this research project. Empirical work was placed at a meta-organisational level to reconstruct how calculations were represented, problematised or invoked by a variety of actors at a variety of sites. Forty-two interviews were conducted within different organisations variously involved in

The safeguard of Venice

The set of scientific debates and public projects denoted today as the “safeguard” of Venice can be traced back to November 1966, when an exceptional high tide submerged the city causing the worst flood known in its history. The disaster helped to realise that the lagoon surrounding Venice had lost much of its natural resilience to floods, due, inter alia, to the industrial developments around the port of Venice which began in the 1920s (Fletcher & Da Mosto, 2004, Fletcher and Spencer, 2005).

The appraisal of the flood protection scheme

The cost–benefit analysis examined here was conducted as part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the flood protection scheme. EIA was introduced in the European Union in 1985 by Directive No. 337, which made such assessments compulsory for some specific categories of projects. The Directive was transposed into Italian law in 1988.

Styles of reasoning and the commensuration of the object of calculation

The controversy presented above unfolded as a disagreement over the acceptable level of abstraction for quantitative representations of the city and the lagoon. In order to calculate overall flood damages, the different traits of the city, of its population and of the lagoon environment had to be made commensurable, aggregated and combined into common measures. At stake was the construction of a unified and systematic vision of the territory, and thus of a space of quantification where

Standardising the subject of calculation

The mobile barrier project is currently under construction and deemed to be 65% complete. Works are expected to be completed by 2014.16 The barrier remains, however, highly controversial. Due to subsequent alterations and integrations to the original project, its costs have risen from just under 4 billion Euro (as estimated in 2001) to 5.5 billion Euro. The Municipality of Venice and environmental

Conclusions

This study shows that commensuration is not simply something that may be achieved or lost, furthered or resisted. If commensuration is ubiquitous (Espeland & Stevens, 1998), it is not an invariant and monolithic phenomenon. Building upon the work of Espeland and Stevens (see also Huault & Rainelli-Weiss, 2011), a more systematic investigation of different modes of commensuration, and the different calculative tools and programmatic ambitions which may sustain them, can be envisaged. The

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Martin Giraudeau, Silvia Jordan, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller for offering instructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks are due to Mike Power for his on-going intellectual support and encouragement. The AC500 seminars at the LSE have provided an invaluable intellectual environment for this study. I also wish to thank participants to the Management Accounting as a Social and Organisational Practice Workshop 2008 in Paris and the Interdisciplinary

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