The call for “more performance” has returned with force across European business and politics as a reaction to perceived decreasing productivity of many economies. It simultaneously reflects changing values and preferences of their societies as to what, how, and why shall be optimized.
Companies announce this openly: Nestlé declares it wants to be more performance-driven; UBS insists that performance must again be at the center. Politics has followed suit. The Schweizerischer Arbeitgeberverband warns of a spreading culture of Lifestyle Freizeit. The German CDU campaigns on Leistung muss sich wieder lohnen — performance must pay. Commentators demand “work in stead of woke.” The word does considerable heavy lifting. The concept itself is rarely examined.
Performance, as we use it today, has a relatively recent history. The historian Nina Verheyen has argued that measurable, comparable individual performance took its current shape in the nineteenth century, shaped by the rise of mass schooling, industrial labor, and the welfare state. Earlier traditions tied performance more closely to the work itself — to craft, to care, to standards of excellence carried out within a practice and judged by its own internal norms. The shift towards abstracted, quantified output was not inevitable. It was constructed, and it can be interrogated. Much of what gets called individual performance has irreducibly relational features. Contributions emerge between people, in context, supported by predecessors, colleagues, institutions, and inherited knowledge. Measurement systems do not simply reflect performance — they constitute what counts as performance and render other kinds of contribution invisible. The colleague who unblocks others, the institutional memory carried by long-serving staff, the care work that makes everything else possible: these tend to fall outside what is captured and rewarded. The map is not the territory, but in performance cultures, the map increasingly determines whose work counts.
The language of performance also carries significant moral weight. A meritocratic reading treats outcomes as broadly deserved and shortfalls as broadly personal. Harvard moral philosopher Michael Sandel has argued that this framing generates hubris among those who succeed and humiliation among those who do not — with consequences for social solidarity that extend well beyond the individuals concerned. Whether and how strongly this dynamic operates across different institutional and cultural settings is itself a pressing research question, one that has gained new urgency in recent debates on polarization, resentment, and the fraying of social cohesion. The performance of an economy is also shaped by forces no individual or firm controls. Demographic change is perhaps the most consequential of these. What does prosperity mean if, by 2050, approximately 30% of the Swiss population is over 65, compared to just 9% in 1950? What does it mean for productivity, innovation, and care if Germany's population begins to shrink and declines by an estimated 13% by mid-century? How can societies harness the potential of longer lives rather than treating extended longevity solely as a fiscal burden? These questions demand that we rethink how and what counts as economic performance — and for whom.
The question of who defines what counts as performance, and who benefits from the categories thereby created, is partly political and philosophical, not only technical. St.Gallen Collegium invites researchers from all fields who are interested in a solution-oriented, interdisciplinary discourse on performance.
