One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification – the production and communication of numbers – as a general sociological phenomenon. Drawing on scholarship across the social sciences in Europe and North America as well as humanistic inquiry, we articulate five sociological dimensions of quantification and call for an ethics of numbers.

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A Sociology of Quantification

Many champions of environmental accounting suggest that calculating and internalizing ‘externalities’ is the solution to environmental problems. Many critics of neoliberalism counter that the spread of market-like calculations into ‘non-market’ spheres, is, on the contrary, itself at the root of such problems. This article proposes setting aside this debate and instead closely examining the concrete conflicts, contradictions and resistances engendered by environmental accounting techniques and the perpetually incomplete efforts of accountants and their allies to overcome them. In particular, it explores how cost–benefit analysis and the carbon accounting techniques required by the Kyoto Protocol, the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme and other carbon trading mechanisms ‘frame’ new agents, spaces, relations and objects, and what the consequences have been and are likely to be.

Toward a different debate in environmental accounting: The cases of carbon and cost–benefit

The latter half of this century has seen an erosion in the perceived legitimacy of science as an impartial means of finding truth. Many research topics are the subject of highly politicized dispute; indeed, the objectivity of the entire discipline of psychology has been called into question. This essay examines attempts to use science to study science: specifically, bias in the interpretation and use of empirical research findings. I examine theory and research on a range of cognitive and motivational mechanisms for bias. Interestingly, not all biases are normatively proscribed; biased interpretations are defensible under some conditions, so long as those conditions are made explicit. I consider a variety of potentially corrective mechanisms, evaluate prospects for collective rationality, and compare inquisitorial and adversarial models of science.

Biases in the interpretation and use of research results.

(1993). Enhancing Statistical Literacy: Enriching Our Society. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 88, No. 421, pp. 1-8.

Enhancing Statistical Literacy: Enriching Our Society

Understanding the dynamics of policy distribution requires an appreciation of federal grant programs that have achieved a prominent place in nearly all areas of domestic policy. The theoretical literature on distributive politics, however, focuses almost exclusively on a centralized, top-down view of policy distribution. By examining the role of presidents, legislators, and bureaucrats, scholars have ignored participants who have become key actors in the distribution of federal expenditures-the recipient jurisdictions. This analysis of the allocation patterns under six federal programs shows that local governments exert important influences on the distribution of federal grants and that the distributional patterns and their determinants vary over time. The analysis also points out the importance of disaggregation by focusing on programs and recipient jurisdictions, as opposed to total federal expenditures and regions, states, or congressional districts.

Distributive politics and the allocation of federal grants

This study undertaken for the National Committee for Research on the 1980 Census is one in a series of volumes concerned with analyses of the results of the 1980 U.S. census. The present volume differs from others in the series in that it focuses not on the data itself but on the governmental system of data collection and analysis. The focus here is on the social and political significance of decisions concerning data collection measurement interpretation and presentation. Part 1 on the politics of economic measurement contains chapters on the different views of economic statistics held by governmental political and academic professionals; the politics of income measurement; and the development of national income accounting. Part 2 is on the politics of population measurement; chapters are included on the 1980 census in historical perspective politics and the measurement of ethnicity and the social and political context of population forecasting. Part 3 focuses on the relationship between the functions of statistics and the characteristics of democratic politics. Part 4 deals with the connections between statistics and various levels of U.S. government. Part 5 contains chapters on technological developments and their consequences and on the rise of the statistical services industry.

Farley R

Papers

The politics of numbers.