Social scientific studies, which focus on the effects of performance indicators and rankings on specific organisational fields, often include accounts of individual professionals whose reaction and attitude towards performance measurement can be summarised as critical, cynical and sometimes even fearful.Sally Engle Merry(2011: S87), who investigates the rapid increase internationally of the use of indicators to monitor like for human rights compliance, describes human rights activists who ‘(u)ntil the 1990s [ … ] resisted the use of indicators because of concern about lack of data, oversimplifications, and bias. [ … ] Indicators measure aggregates, while human rights are held by individuals’. The criticism from activists was that the specificity of the human right, its individual violation and the country’s specific context might be overlooked or misrepresented when international organisations begin to use indicators to calculate something like a human rights compliance rate.