The New Production of Expert Knowledge in Education: An Overview

Over more than half a century, the dominance of International Organisations (IOs) in the production of global metrics has transformed global governance. However, amidst the avid critics and unapologetic fans of ‘governing by numbers’, it is still surprising that we know so little about the ways in which global processes of quantification are reconfiguring their work in the fast-moving field of global challenges. Metrics have infiltrated not only IOs’ organisational cultures and the environments these organisations inhabit; crucially, they are reshaping the ways IOs co-exist, compete and survive in an increasingly datafied, yet uncertain world. This introductory chapter outlines briefly some of the transformations of IO expert knowledge production over the last 50 years and gives an overview of the book’s main arguments and structure.