Algorithms, Governance, and Governmentality

TLDR

Algorithmic actions are increasingly seen as opaque, automatic forces embedded in everyday life that both organize opportunities and perform social sorting, raising concerns that such pervasive ordering should be explicitly governed through greater transparency and democratic design. The article argues that governing practices of algorithmic actors are best understood through Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Governmentality reveals how governing practices performatively problematize and enact calculative technologies of governance, generating internalized domains of knowledge that shape self‑governing subjects, as illustrated by attempts to regulate academic writing via Turnitin.

Abstract

Algorithms, or rather algorithmic actions, are seen as problematic because they are inscrutable, automatic, and subsumed in the flow of daily practices. Yet, they are also seen to be playing an important role in organizing opportunities, enacting certain categories, and doing what David Lyon calls “social sorting.” Thus, there is a general concern that this increasingly prevalent mode of ordering and organizing should be governed more explicitly. Some have argued for more transparency and openness, others have argued for more democratic or value-centered design of such actors. In this article, we argue that governing practices—of, and through algorithmic actors—are best understood in terms of what Foucault calls governmentality. Governmentality allows us to consider the performative nature of these governing practices. They allow us to show how practice becomes problematized, how calculative practices are enacted as technologies of governance, how such calculative practices produce domains of knowledge and expertise, and finally, how such domains of knowledge become internalized in order to enact self-governing subjects. In other words, it allows us to show the mutually constitutive nature of problems, domains of knowledge, and subjectivities enacted through governing practices. In order to demonstrate this, we present attempts to govern academic writing with a specific focus on the algorithmic action of Turnitin.