Explaining the World of 'Big Data': Global IT Consultancy and Reshaping of Policy Knowledge in South Korea

This analysis of the process through which South Korean government produced policy knowledge for 'Big Data' policy demonstrates a certain actor's - global IT consultancy - intervention upon it. The gap between an actor's cognitive capacity and the complex, thus unobservable world gives birth to a number of institutions producing knowledge, especially which not only describes the world, but ‘performs’ as the inter-subjectivity among actors for their reflexive adjustments, thus have ‘performativity.’ Given this, the article explores how the knowledge offered by global IT consultancy converted the Korean government’s attempt to describing the sociotechnical world of ‘Big Data,’ and examines how the intervention persisted. The precedent STS scholars' arguments on performativity starting from Callon's analysis of economics have demonstrated how a certain way of explaining the world forms the frame among actors while overflowing from the outside of the frame is pervasive. The performativity scholars emphasized continuous maintenance and re-arrangement of the explanatory devices, and successively showed those are essential to suppress overflowing.

Nevertheless, this article suggests that the knowledge from global IT consultancy can still be performative even when the devices and their arrangement are increasingly deemed questionable and replaced by other ways of explanation; overflowing does not necessarily mean the weakened frame. At first, as Korean government introduced the conceptual scheme, statistics, and survey results of global IT consultancy to explain the changing sociotechnical environment, the concept of market transactions gradually substituted in the policy knowledge the past concept of cooperative relationship for contriving creative usage in which citizen take the lead. Even though such explanatory devices were questioned for their naïve worldviews and once having excluded concept of ‘citizen’ overflowed, market model still persisted and ‘citizen’ was only taken as potential sources of lucrative data. The finding suggests our understanding of performativity of knowledge can be extended.