The Epistemology of Metrics: How Quantification Shapes What Organisations Believe Is “Real” — A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Engineering and Academia

Metrics have become central to how engineering and academia define competence, legitimacy, and success. Chartership, licensure, higher degrees, university rankings, and citation indices are treated as objective indicators of capability and quality. Yet these metrics carry different meanings across national contexts, disciplinary traditions, and institutional cultures, shaping what organisations notice, value, and treat as "real." This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding metrics as epistemic infrastructure: systems that structure attention, shape identity, and guide organisational behaviour. Drawing on comparative analysis of engineering credentialing and academic evaluation across UK, Australian, European, and US contexts, the framework identifies three characteristic distortions of quantification—compression, incentive, and legitimacy—that explain how metrics systematically reshape organisational perception and behaviour. It introduces the Global Metric–Identity Feedback Loop to explain how these distortions become self-reinforcing through use. The analysis demonstrates that metrics function as epistemic filters, highlighting certain forms of expertise while obscuring others. Through the Global Metric–Identity Feedback Loop, metrics shape how individuals understand professional success, influence behavioural responses, and become self-reinforcing through use. Importantly, global metrics often privilege Western epistemic traditions and credentialing systems, creating systematic disadvantages for institutions and individuals operating under different norms. The framework offers diagnostic tools for analysing credential and evaluation systems across professional and academic contexts. By recognising metrics as situated practices rather than universal standards, organisations can make more informed decisions about evaluation design, support diverse forms of expertise, and resist the homogenising pressures of global quantification.