My interest in the history of incentives emerged from an interest in the present. Or more specifically: in present-day practices of governing citizens and civil servants. Or in an even more concise manner: in state power. Under the heading of The Incentivizing State, I conducted a series of qualitative case studies in which I explore the way experts and policymakers rely on incentives to understand what people do and to steer their behavior in a different direction.
My first case study on welfare-to-work services was an assignment of the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR) located in The Hague. For a project on the relationship between market, state and society, I was asked to conduct a series of interviews with participants in a local market for such services. In the report and paper that resulted from this project, I focused on the mismatch between the government’s expectations about markets and the daily reality of market operations a decade after welfare-to-work services had been privatized. As a side-issue, I was struck by the reliance of economic experts and policymakers on the alleged efficacy of ‘incentives’ to do all sorts of work in the whole operation of making welfare-to-work services a matter of private sector.
This sense of surprise sparked a long historical detour in which I discovered that there was a fascinating story to be told about ‘incentives’. In my dissertation, I presented the current vogue for incentives in the public sector – and education in particular – as the provisional endpoint of that historical trajectory. Unsatisfied with my brief engagement with present-day instances of incentivization, I designed a second case study on performance pay for teachers. More in particular, I focused on the role of economic experts in policy-making processes in general and on the construction of forecasts about the economic effects of educational reforms more in particular.
In my new research project, I shift from a political to an organizational level. Retaining my earlier emphasis on ways to understand and manage human behavior, I currently work on a third case study on two medical research centers in the Netherlands. Where one medical research center opts for the alignment between internal performance criteria and performance criteria that are external to the organization, the other attempted to break with a framework of research excellence and foster scientific practices that are more responsive to healthcare needs. In this comparative study, I focus on the differences between research institutions in terms of their understanding of the governability of biomedical research practices and the instruments they develop to manage these practices.