The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society

Sætnan, Ann Rudinow; Lomell, Heidi Mork; Hammer, Svein

doi:10.4324/9780203846612

Cited by 56 publications

(23 citation statements)

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“…Similarly, anthropologies of numbers suggest that "our lives are increasingly governed by -and through -numbers, indicators, algorithms and audits and the ever-present concerns with the management of risk" (SHORE; WRIGHT, 2015, p. 23) (MERRY, 2011;SAUDER;ESPELAND, 2009;STRATHERN, 2000). Further on, important insights and perspectives on indicators in particular come from STS (BOWKER; STAR, 1999;LAMPLAND;STARR, 2009;LATOUR, 1987;SAETNAN;LOMELL;HAMMEL, 2011), including actor network theory (LATOUR, 2005). Finally, there is a small but growing body of studies relating to specific uses of indicators and quantification in transnational governance contexts (BOGDANDY; DANN; GOLDMANN, 2008;PALAN, 2006;MARTENS, 2007;FOUGNER, 2008;BHUTA, 2012).…”

Section: "Governing By Numbers" In Transnational Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Atores Do Conhecimento E a Construção De Novos Cenários De Governança: O Caso Da Direção-Geral De Educação E Cultura Da Comissão Europeia

Grek

2016

Educ. Soc.

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This paper focuses on the case of education governance in Europe. This field has been dominated by major transnational interest and organizations, among which the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the European Commission (EC) are two of the most significant. The paper aims to explore and explain what the constitutive effects of measurement and standard setting practices are in the increasing policy convergence, between the EC's Directorate General Education and Culture (DG EAC) and the OECD; the latter -through PISA and other international test -has become an influential actor in education policy globally. The paper aims to identify the effects of "governing by numbers" in the interrelationships between the two international organizations themselves.

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Section: "Governing By Numbers" In Transnational Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Atores Do Conhecimento E a Construção De Novos Cenários De Governança: O Caso Da Direção-Geral De Educação E Cultura Da Comissão Europeia

Grek

2016

Educ. Soc.

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“…One of the key issues is that statistics, indicators and different methods/techniques/artefacts/ routines of data production and use often obtain a status of 'second nature', in which the statistics are used as a self-evident object (Saetnan et al, 2010); in this way, when data are taken as an 'entity' or as an 'objective fact' by policy makers (or by researchers), they produce 'real' social impacts. If we examine the profound theoretical and technological 'embeddedness' of data collection tools as well as the technologies and artefacts (the algorithms and the software) that incorporate them, the powerful naturalising social impact of the data presented as naturalised objects become visible (Saetnan et al, 2010).…”

Section: What's the Problem?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If we examine the profound theoretical and technological 'embeddedness' of data collection tools as well as the technologies and artefacts (the algorithms and the software) that incorporate them, the powerful naturalising social impact of the data presented as naturalised objects become visible (Saetnan et al, 2010). Such objectified data justifies discourse and actions with crucial effects on the reputation of whole educational systems, its teachers and its schools.…”

Section: What's the Problem?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Distal and Proximal Vision: A Multi-Perspective Research in Sociology of Education

Giancola

Viteritti

2014

European Educational Research Journal

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Drawing inspiration from the research conducted in Italian schools involved in the reform process, the article proposes to investigate two visions in the research on Sociology of Education: one distal and the other proximal. The distal vision is offered by quantitative research nowadays supported by extensive public funding and framed as comparative international programmes, while the proximal one concerns mainly qualitative methodological and epistemology perspectives. In an attempt to bring the strengths of each into focus, the article approaches these two visions.

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“…Some of these emissions are digital by‐products of routine transactions (such as journal citations), others have to be collected by means of surveys or other formal data collection techniques (such as the National Student Survey 1 (NSS)) and others still require the formation of a whole expensive bureaucratic edifice designed to assess the quality of administrative, teaching and research work (such as – the focus of this paper – research assessment exercises). The performative mutual or co‐construction (Saetnan et al ., 2011) of academic life through myriad metrics – such as the NSS, the Transparent Approach to Costing (TRAC) 2 data, data on average UCAS entry tariffs, 3 PhD completion rates, research income per capita, individual and group h‐indices (Woeginger, 2008), journal impact factors, Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) subject and institutional reviews and so on – is ubiquitous. Increasingly, of course, such data is also being formally aggregated into any number of commercially driven ranking and ‘league’ table systems, such as those developed by various national newspapers and, now, at a global level, by Times Higher Education (THE) 4 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring the Value of Sociology? Some Notes on Performative Metricization in the Contemporary Academy

Kelly¹,

Burrows²

2011

The Sociological Review

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The performative co‐construction of academic life through myriad metrics is now a global phenomenon as indicated by the plethora of university research or journal ranking systems and the publication of ‘league’ tables based on them. If these metrics are seen as actively constituting the social world, can an analysis of this ‘naturally occurring’ data reveal how these new technologies of value and measure are recursively defining the practices and subjects of university life? In the UK higher education sector, the otherwise mundane realities of academic life have come to be recursively lived through a succession of research assessment exercises (RAEs). Lived through not only in the RAEs themselves, but also through the managed incremental changes to the academic and organizational practices linked to the institutional imaginings of planning for, and anticipating the consequences of, the actual exercises. In the ‘planning for’ mode an increasing proportion of formerly sociology submissions have shifted into ‘social policy’. This is one instance of how institutional ‘game‐playing’ in relation to the RAE enacts the social in quite fundamental ways. Planning an RAE 2008 submission in Sociology required anticipation of how a panel of 16 peers would evaluate 39 institutions by weighted, relative worth of: aggregated data from 1,267 individuals who, between them cited a total of 3,729 ‘outputs’; the detailed narrative and statistical data on the research environment; and a narrative account of academic ‘esteem’. This data provided such institutional variables as postgraduate student numbers, sources of student funding, and research income from various sources. To evaluate the ‘quality’ of outputs various measures of the ‘impact’ and/or ‘influence’ of journals, as developed from the Thomson‐Reuters Journal Citation Reports, was linked to the data. An exploratory modelling exercise using these variables to predict RAE 2008 revealed that despite what we might like to think about the subtle nuances involved in peer review judgements, it turns out that a fairly astonishing 83 per cent of the variance in outcomes can be predicted by some fairly simple ‘shadow metrics’: quality of journals in the submission, research income per capita and scale of research activity. We conclude that measuring the value of sociology involves multiple mutual constructions of reality within which ever more nuanced data assemblages are increasingly implicated and that analysis of this data can make explicit some of the parameters of enactment within which we operate in the contemporary academy.

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The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society

Cited by 56 publications

References 0 publications

Atores Do Conhecimento E a Construção De Novos Cenários De Governança: O Caso Da Direção-Geral De Educação E Cultura Da Comissão Europeia

Atores Do Conhecimento E a Construção De Novos Cenários De Governança: O Caso Da Direção-Geral De Educação E Cultura Da Comissão Europeia

Distal and Proximal Vision: A Multi-Perspective Research in Sociology of Education

Measuring the Value of Sociology? Some Notes on Performative Metricization in the Contemporary Academy

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