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.
Highlights
In 2018, Mark Koester, a software developer, published “A Year in Numbers: My Data from 2017” (Koester 2018)
We offer an assessment of the literature on quantification across these domains of personal life, organizations, and markets; how it evolved in the past twenty years or so; and its implications for sociology
We focus on four locations in which quantification and quantification scholarship have expanded over the past few years
Summary
In 2018, Mark Koester, a software developer, published “A Year in Numbers: My Data from 2017” (Koester 2018). Like their French counterparts, they emphasized the applications and practical consequences of probability and statistics for fields such as administration, public health, insurance, politics, law, and the economy; they investigated the resources, classification, and coordination that were required to produce statistics, what Bowker & Star (2000) might call the informational infrastructure of statistics; and they considered how quantification changed how people understood their worlds and acted in them.
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