Calculable Bureaucratic Time: The Performativity of Data and Dashboards in a Digitizing Public Bureaucracy

Public bureaucracies, in their pioneering description, are rationalized spaces necessitating “slow” temporalities of processual work. Yet, around the world focus on speed and acceleration in society at large has led to making bureaucratic time more discrete and calculable. In India, since the advent of the modern colonial bureaucracy, time has been materialized through clocks, calendars and time-sheets, yet this has not resulted in discrete, measurable time. Present attempts to calculate time depend on the production of time-tracking “real time” data, estheticized on data dashboards to track and measure bureaucratic activity. Closely following the making of time data and its circulation through mediatory devices in a program aiming to digitally control the delivery of public services in southern India, I show how this data is made performative as calculable bureaucratic time. Performativity appears in two ways, first through the materiality of ranks, standards and interfaces marshaled to produce and publicize bureaucratic time as a valorized goal and, second, the deployment of this data to create an image of an ideal bureaucrat and thereby change the subjective experiences of lower order bureaucrats. In highlighting data's performativity, this article provides a contextual account of the workings of data beyond its representative functions.