School of Social and Political Science

Description

Funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation

What is data’s value?

Major firms such as Google or Facebook accumulate vast wealth by treating data as assets that generate financial value. By contrast, social enterprises — third sector organisations that engage in trading activities to generate societal benefits — increasingly consider how data may be mobilised to produce forms of value other than shareholder profit. As data are increasingly monetised, traded, and circulated within new data economies, we must consider what kinds of value are extracted from data and for whom, and with what socio-political and economic effects.

Research in two contrasting contexts, Bangladesh and Scotland, enables the project to respond to wider debates in international development while drawing comparison with debates about data in post-industrial countries. This project generates ethnographic evidence and interactive digital resources exploring how data are used by social enterprises to pursue social value and challenge large institutions’ hold on defining and exploiting data’s value(s). As ‘data’ are any organised knowledge, ethnography is crucial for revealing how that knowledge is produced and for whom. Interlinked academic, public, practitioner, and policy-oriented outputs will provoke stakeholders to imagine and contribute to data economies that challenge inequalities.

The project apprehends data via its artefacts, as ethnographic objects, whether in filing cabinets or in the cloud. It tracks data practices (how data is understood, collected, treated, exchanged) and data politics (who performs data labour, determines data’s ownership, or accrues power). The project aims to contribute novel anthropological insights about how new social enterprise data economies take shape and influence the conditions for contesting socioeconomic inequalities.