Sometimes companies want to stay blind

In Seeing Like a State, James C Scott says that for a government administrator there are virtually no other facts than those that are in standardized documents and data sets. The accumulation of data allows a state to “see” better and effect more sweeping changes in society.

This ability to “see” through data can be used for good or for ill. When the Nazis occupied Amsterdam, they were able to identify, round up, and deport 65,000 Jews because the Netherlands kept registries of all their citizens. This kind of record-keeping

“merely amplifies the capacity of the state for discriminating interventions. A capacity that in principle could as easily have been deployed to feed the Jews as to deport them.”

It struck me that the fact that data can enable either good or evil leads to opposite responses in the US vs. Kenya with regards to issues of racial/tribal equity.

In 2020 in the US, something I heard often from businesspeople interested in addressing racial equity was something like “if you aren’t disaggregating your hiring, promotion, and retention statistics by race, you’re never going to know if you have problems.” The assumption being that a lot of companies want to have better representation of e.g., black and Latino employees, so tracking will help them achieve that goal.

In Kenya, as far as I know, most companies do not officially track the tribe of their employees (1). There is a high degree of economic and social inequality between different tribal groups within Kenya, so you might think that Kenyan companies interested in addressing this inequalities would want to track the relevant data, as is done in the US. But by my understanding, officially tracking your employees’ tribe in Kenya is just totally out of the question. Everyone would assume you wanted to show favoritism to one of the most powerful tribes and discriminate against the rest (2).

Standardized data sets allow companies to see better and make more informed decisions, for good or ill. And if you are in an environment where people assume you will use your data for ill, it’s better to stay blind and just not collect that data at all.

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1. Disclaimer that even in writing this sentence I’m entering a world of Kenyan tribal representation and politics where I’m way over my head

2. This type of favoritism is common in politics. Kenyan presidents have blatantly given administrative jobs to those of their own tribes: in the two last terms of President Moi (of the Kalenjin tribe), “two of Kenya’s largest ethnic groups (the Kikuyu and the Luo) were virtually absent from his administration” (page 28). The title of Michela Wrong’s book It’s Our Turn to Eat about corruption in President Kibaki’s administration comes from a phrase used by members of Kibaki’s tribe in anticipation extracting benefits for themselves from the presidential administration