Engineering Compliance Through Biased Measurements
Institutions and corporations further entrench their power by engineering compliance through measurement systems. They establish the criteria by which success, performance, and legitimacy are measured – criteria that often reflect and reinforce existing inequalities. By defining the rules of the game, those in power ensure that decision-making is confined to issues they deem safe, effectively limiting challenges to the Master's House.
In practice, this means people and organizations must conform to biased metrics to be deemed “excellent” or “qualified.” For example:
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Standardized testing and hiring algorithms: From school exams to job application screenings, ostensibly “objective” metrics often carry embedded biases. Standardized tests strongly correlate with socio-economic background rather than pure ability, giving wealthier individuals a built-in edge.
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In the workplace, AI-driven hiring tools have learned to replicate past biases under the guise of objectivity. A notorious case at Amazon found that its resume-screening AI “taught itself that male candidates were preferable”, penalizing resumes containing the word “women's” and downgrading graduates of women's colleges. By automating bias, such tools enforce compliance with the profile of past hires – typically the dominant group – filtering out those who don't fit the mold. This creates a self-perpetuating loop: the metric (the AI's rating) defines merit according to historical patterns, which preserves the existing demographic makeup and power hierarchy.
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Corporate KPIs and performance metrics: Companies use Key Performance Indicators and rating systems to align employee behavior with corporate goals. This can become a subtle form of control. Workers internalize targets (sales quotas, productivity scores, etc.) set by leadership, often at the expense of their own well-being or alternative values. As one analysis of power notes, powerful actors can shape people's perceptions of their situation such that they comply because they are incapable of imagining an alternative. Compliance is seen as natural.
For instance, a firm that glorifies long hours and “hustle” will reward those who overwork, sending the message that this is the only path to success. Employees, hoping to advance, then self-discipline to meet the metric (hours worked or projects delivered), even if it harms them. The measure (hours) comes to stand in for merit, and workers comply voluntarily with exploitative norms believing they are doing the “right” thing. Through this mechanism, institutions harness measurement bias to secure obedience – what Michel Foucault termed “governing the soul”, where people police themselves to hit externally imposed benchmarks. -
Regulatory and financial metrics: On a larger scale, regulatory capture ensures that the standards by which companies are judged are aligned with industry interests. Regulators, often influenced by lobbyists or coming from the same industry, may define success in narrow financial terms (e.g. bank capital ratios, or pharma drug approval counts) rather than broader public welfare. This creates a veneer of technocratic legitimacy around corporate conduct while sidelining externalities like inequality or environmental damage. Capture operates through a veneer of consensus, which suppresses the ability to imagine alternative interests and policy outcomes. In other words, the regulatory system projects an image of impartial, data-driven oversight (consensus on metrics and frames) even as it systematically favors incumbent powers and shuts out dissenting voices. Measurement bias here is twofold: it biases what gets measured (emphasizing metrics that matter to the powerful) and biases how those measurements are interpreted (spinning outcomes as success even when systemic issues fester).
Across these domains, legitimacy is defined by the very structures that perpetuate inequality. To be “qualified” you must have credentials or scores only accessible to those already advantaged. To be “efficient” or “profitable” you might cut labor costs or dodge taxes, practices common among dominant firms. Those who play by different rules or propose alternative metrics of success find themselves discredited.
This is how neoliberal systems enforce compliance: they make the path to opportunity contingent on navigating metrics that encode the status quo. Ambitious individuals and organizations, rather than challenging the system, devote themselves to excelling within its narrow definitions – securing funding by pleasing venture capital pattern-matching.