Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the ordinary and profound stuff that enable market interventions to happen. It compares attempts to solve public problems in online data and children at-risk of going into care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper offers a comparative analysis of the ordinary and profound stuff that enable market interventions to happen. First it explores the role of data in the constitution of interventions in the online data market. We suggest that data becomes a focal point for the arrangement of Data Protection legislation which now explicitly looks to recompose the online data market, what counts as privacy, property rights in data, who and what gets to control who and what. Second, data is contrasted with care, in particular residential care for children at-risk. In interventions that seek to shape the social investment market toward low cost solutions to public problems, transforming children at-risk into an investment proposition, care becomes part of a new financial assessment device: days of care averted. While attempts to regulate the online data market struggle to shift data from an ordinary, trivial, taken for granted matter to something worthy of renewed attention, care moves in the opposite direction. From a profound, dedicated and personal matter of practice, care is transformed into a routine indicator of success; a means to quickly see if expensive care has been averted and costs saved. In analysing both the move from pervasive to profound and profound to trivial, the paper opens up opportunities for exploring mundane market matters. The paper adds to the current interest amongst Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars in markets by drawing together market studies with STS science and technology policy and literature on the mundane.