Publikation

Titel:

Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig...? Quantifizierung und der Wert des Glücks

AutorInnen:

Kappler, Karolin
Vormbusch, Uwe

Kategorie:

Beiträge in referierten Zeitschriften

erschienen in:

Sozialwissenschaften und Berufspraxis (SuB), Band 37, Ausgabe 2, 2014, S. 267-281. {Link}

Abstract:

Currently, an explosion of digital data, measurements and forms of valuation can be observed. This extension of calculative practices to the body, the psyche and the subjectivity of experience includes also the tracking of happiness and can be understood as a specific form of "calculating the social" (Vormbusch 2012). The scientific discourse of critical accounting studies and parts of economic sociology with regards to the relevance of numbers is influenced by the notion that numbers should be studied as a specific form of knowledge or being linked to social institutions. Beyond this approach of numbers as representing a form of cognitive knowledge, the quantification of happiness will be studied in the frame of the current transdisciplinary discussion of 'valuation studies', which analyse 'valuation' as a social practice. Based on qualitative interviews with self-tracking members of the Quantified Self-network, the article presents how actors and innovators try to visualize and measure the value of happiness. Thereby, they generate happiness as a new object of social comparison. The article explains the variety of unfolding practices of happiness-tracking and how -- based on individual and social metrics, practices and discourses -- "happiness is made" (Duttweiler 2007). The measurement of this immaterial and volatile 'commodity' -- by giving a concrete example- illustrates the social modification of the meaning of "happiness" between the project of a "beautiful life" (Schulze 1992) and the individualized ethics of performance in the context of present-day capitalism.