Technologies of Neoliberalism: Is the Evaluation of European Digital Policies a Vehicle for the Neoliberalization of the Public Sector?

The rise of knowledge-based society came along with the neoliberal transformation of the State, the latter being characterized by the proliferation of instruments aiming at measuring and monitoring State’s behavior with respect to debt, corruption, democracy, efficiency. Through its emphasis on calculation and standardization, neoliberalism made evaluation a formidable source of knowledge and power for setting policy frameworks and imposing a system of values. The paper argues that evaluation has worked as a disciplinary instrument for the neoliberal restructuring of the State, which realized through a twofold process. In the first place, the State has been transformed into an “evaluated State”, with the EU working as a disciplinary framework for its neoliberalization. In the second place, the State has become an “evaluative State”, an institutional regulatory regime aiming at implementing neoliberal principles based on the alleged neutral role played by evaluation and evaluators. As a case in point, the paper focuses on the neoliberal transformation of higher education, both at the institutional and individual level, and the disciplinary function of evaluation in this process.