Calibrating families: data behaviourism and the new algorithmic logic

Abstract

Family intervention is a long-established mechanism of state control, but recent technological developments are facilitating new regulatory capacities and objectives. This paper will explore how contemporary policy interventions in the UK are converging around a technological solutionist ideology that centres family relationships as core instruments of social management. The last decade has seen a marked techno-administrative turn, with family state relationships increasingly mediated through online portals and dashboards. Over the last few years this data centric model has accelerated towards an algorithmic approach to governance through the incorporation of big data surveillance, predictive analytics and behavioural interventions to monitor and socially engineer populations. We trace the embedding of data collection frameworks into apparently conventional family intervention programs and show how this ‘datification’ was made into a core delivery tool. We also highlight how secrecy, or at the very least strategic silence, has restricted public knowledge of how and why data is being collected and used in the UK. We show how parents and children are being quantified and translated into data points to support new logics of choice manipulation, ceding unprecedented power to financiers, data analytic and social marketing companies, platform developers and big tech industries. This algorithmic calibration of children and parents is extending the regulatory powers of the state far beyond previous efforts to govern and control poor families with under explored consequences for principles of democracy and justice.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Rosalind Edwards: orcid.org/0000-0002-3512-9029

ORCID for Helene Vannier Ducasse: orcid.org/0000-0001-9010-6500

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