What's New with Numbers? Sociological Approaches to the Study of Quantification

Abstract

Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scholarship have particularly flourished: administration, democratic rule, economics, and personal life. In doing so, we seek to stimulate more cross-disciplinary debate and exchange. We caution against unifying accounts of quantification and highlight the importance of tracking quantification across different sites in order to appreciate its essential ambiguity and conduct more systematic investigations of interactions between different quantification regimes.

Escaping numbers? The ambiguities of the governance of education through data

“…Responding to recent calls for systematic investigations of quantification and governance by numbers in situ (Mennicken & Espeland, 2019), the authors in this special issue explore numbers empirically. By way of context, therefore, it is important to consider the historical dimension of how numbers initially escaped into the domain of education.…”

Just Look at the Numbers: A Case Study on Quantification in Corporate Environmental Disclosures

“…Quantification, broadly defined as the production and communication of numbers, has always been a critical feature of modern society. In this section, we draw on the body of literature called the sociology of quantification, especially Porter (1992;1995), Espeland and Stevens (1998;2008), Espeland and Sauder (2016) and Mennicken and Espeland (2019), to illustrate the importance of the practice of quantification for communicating abstract but often contradictory ideas. Their arguments are informed by the thinking of Desrosiers, according to whom numbers, while representing reality, also intervene in people's interpretations about the reality they represent.…”

“…In seeking to provide new insights to the discussion, we will draw on the sociology of quantification (e.g. Desrosieres 2001;Espeland 2016;Espeland and Sauder 2016;Mennicken and Espeland 2019) to illustrate the role numbers play in the process of communicating environmental information. Prior literature suggests that representing environmental actions as numbers is likely to have diverse effects.…”

Research metrics, labor markets, and epistemic change: evidence from Britain 1970-2018

“…Work in the related field of research evaluation (Rijcke et al 2016; de Rijcke and Rushforth 2015) has nevertheless produced numerous discussions about the measurement of science, including important studies on how the use of metrics and indicators shape the practices of scientists and their host institutions. Reflecting some of the key concerns and debates from the sociology of quantification (Berman and Hirschman 2018;Espeland and Stevens 2008;Mennicken and Nelson Espeland 2019), contemporary studies of research evaluations have located these within a "broader surge of accountability measures" (Rijcke et al 2016:162) across public institutions, where audit logics transform the structural affordances and strategic behaviors available to actors. By quantifying, making visible, and incentivizing certain publications, outputs, and research activities over others, evaluations and their associated logics are seen to affect the production of knowledge in three distinct ways.…”