Managerial devices are rapidly developing as a means for driving the legal performance of organisations, including those of states and corporations. This paper explores the managerial rationality underpinning global legal indicators, and the constraints they convey on institutional behaviour. In particular, it argues that indicators are better understood as part of a system of management control and distributed governance, which is steadily eroding state-centred forms of authority, including state law. In this context, legitimacy and reactivity are contingent to their cycle of production and implementation, which is fourfold: data-collecting, benchmarking, auditing and allocating incentives. Each process is meant to generate respectively subjectification, self-knowledge by comparison, accountability and stimulus for action. Indicators with higher degrees of legitimacy become entrenched in institutional practices and legal decision-making processes. The paper concludes that regulatory spaces where indicators unfold need critical and political scrutiny to expose their pernicious effects, undesirable uses and inevitable misuses.

中文翻译：

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与魔鬼共进晚餐？指标与法律管理理性的兴起

管理设备正在迅速发展，作为推动组织（包括国家和公司）合法绩效的一种手段。本文探讨了支撑全球法律指标的管理理性，以及它们对制度行为的约束。特别是，它认为指标被更好地理解为管理控制和分布式治理系统的一部分，这正在稳步侵蚀以国家为中心的权威形式，包括州法律。在这种情况下，合法性和反应性取决于它们的生产和实施周期，这有四个方面：数据收集、基准测试、审计和分配激励措施。每个过程都旨在分别产生主体化、比较自我认识、问责制和行动刺激。具有较高合法性的指标在制度实践和法律决策过程中变得根深蒂固。该论文的结论是，指标展开的监管空间需要进行严格的政治审查，以揭露其有害影响、不良用途和不可避免的误用。