With this inaugural issue, Performance enters the field for the first time. The essays gathered here examine what it means to perform — and to measure performance — across the computational, economic, and ecological systems now reshaping intellectual life. Measurement, we are reminded, is never neutral. To count is to choose what counts; to name a method is to discipline a practice.
The lead article reconstructs the mathematical paradigm of knowledge-work performance evaluation, recasting it as a stochastic process under incomplete information and arguing for conditional expectation as its analytical foundation. The essays that follow extend the inquiry in various directions: Jiang on the marketization potential of university sports facilities and the Chinese experience; Shen on a decade of legal developments in social insurance and welfare benefits (2016–2025); Liang on empirical evidence for the development and assessment of reading and writing abilities among primary and secondary school students; and He on the construction of integrity indicators and the quantification of professional ethics for accounting personnel.
We are grateful to the authors who entrusted us with their work, and to the reviewers and editorial board who made this debut possible — their labour is uncompensated, anonymous, and essential.
— The Performance Editorial Leadership