Suchergebnisse

1.The New Politics of Numbers: An Introduction -- 2.Creating a Socialist Society and Quantification in the USSR -- 3.The People's Algorithms: Social Credits and the Rise of China's Big (Br)other -- 4.Accounting for Who We Are and What We Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Social Disquiet -- 5.Quantifying Inequality: From Contentious Politics to the Dream of an Indifferent Power -- 6.Homo Statisticus: A History of France's General Public Statistical Infrastructure on Population since 1950 -- 7.A New Calculable World in the Making: Governing through Transnational Certification Standards -- 8.Do Performance Indicators Improve the Effectiveness of Development Aid? -- 9.Archaeology of a Quantification Device: Quantification, Policies and Politics in French Higher Education -- 10.Quantification = Economization? Numbers, Ratings and Rankings in the Prison Service of England and Wales -- 11.The Shifting Legitimacies of Price Measurements: Official Statistics and the Quantification of Pwofitasyon in the 2009 Social Struggle in Guadeloupe -- 12."La donnée n'est pas un donné": Statistics, Quantification and Democratic Choice -- 13.Free from Numbers? The Politics of Qualitative Sociology in the U.S. since 1945.

This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.

ZusammenfassungIn diesem Beitrag gehen wir zwei Fragen nach. Erstens, inwiefern kann ein Fokus auf Praktiken der Bewertung zur Klärung des Zusammenhangs zwischen Vergleich, Kategorisierung und Quantifizierung beitragen? Und zweitens, inwieweit verhilft er dazu, die Voraussetzungen und Folgen neuer digitaler Formate, wie etwa Vergleichsportale, Empfehlungssysteme oder Screening- und Scoring-Verfahren, besser zu verstehen? Im Gegensatz zur Auffassung, dass Wert im Bewusstsein des Subjekts (als Präferenz) existiert oder eine objektive Eigenschaft eines Gutes ist, argumentieren wir, dass ein Gut erst durch Bewertungspraktiken und -technologien wie Ratings, Rankings und andere evaluative Infrastrukturen als wertvoll oder als nicht wertvoll bestimmt wird. Wir entwickeln einen analytischen Rahmen für die Untersuchung interaktiver, digitalisierter Bewertungstechnologien und schlagen vor, dass sich solche Technologien besser analysieren und verstehen lassen, wenn wir den Fokus auf drei Elemente legen: erstens auf evaluative Infrastrukturen, verstanden als Bewertungsregime – und nicht als einzelne Bewertungsinstrumente, zweitens auf das Protokoll als ein evaluativen Infrastrukturen eigenes Machtinstrument, wobei Macht in diesem Fall paradoxerweise (und im Unterschied zum Disziplinarregime) zugleich verteilt und konzentriert ist, und drittens auf das generative (statt nur performative) Potenzial solcher digitalisierter Bewertungsregime, also deren Fähigkeit, neue Werte und Kategorisierungen mittels evaluativer Infrastrukturen zu produzieren.

This chapter sets out what is "new" in the politics of numbers and this volume's approach to their study. Rather than asking what quantification is, this volume is interested in describing and analysing what quantification does, tracking and unpacking various quantification practices and their manifold consequences in different domains. The book revisits the power of numbers, and examines changing relations between numbers and democracy. It engages, for the first time, Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, the volume seeks to account more systematically for the plurality of the possible ways in which numbers can come to govern, highlighting not only disciplinary effects but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer.

Not Available.

This paper uses the case of prison privatization in England and Wales to scrutinize what it means to "economize the social" through numbers. It argues that we ought to be careful not to equate quantification with economization. To uncover the multiple effects of economization and quantification brought about by new public management reforms and prison privatization, one needs to set presumed dichotomies between the public and the private aside and turn instead to the multiplicity of economizing practices (curtailing, marketizing, financializing) and their implication in different forms of quantification. Ironically, numbers and state contracts governing privately managed prisons also shielded these establishments from economization (e.g. budgetary savings requests); and it is the public prisons that have been exposed the most to measures of government austerity.

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.

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.

Sociologists have largely neglected the topic of failure, and particularly the economising of failure, notwithstanding notable exceptions. This is puzzling, given the many adjacent literatures that have addressed the practices and processes of economising. Four features define our approach. First, it is argued that failure has none of the objectivity or inevitability often attributed to it. Second, it is suggested that failure be viewed as a variable ontology object. Third, attention is directed to the calculative infrastructures that operationalise the ideas of failing and failure, and enable them to be acted upon. Fourth, emphasis is placed on the importance of distinguishing between failing and failure. The chapter proceeds in three stages. First, it considers the neglect of the topic of failure in sociology. Second, it examines briefly the economising of the economy through the economising of failure for the corporate world across more or less the whole of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Third, it examines the economising of the public sphere and particularly the domain of hospital-based healthcare in England across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. In conclusion, we identify possible further lines of enquiry.

Accounting and auditing are often cited as key sites where business regulation has been privatized, globalized and neoliberalized. Yet, these sites have also undergone a legitimacy crisis in recent years, marked by a shift from self-regulation to increased public oversight. This paper investigates these developments by reference to the evolution of a public/private audit oversight regime (audit of the auditors) in Russia. We show how, in the early stages of post-Soviet reforms, old state-administered forms of financial oversight were replaced with market-oriented arrangements (peer reviews) offered by newly founded private professional accountancy associations as a service to their members. Fifteen years later, the process of regulatory privatization culminated in a reinvigoration of public authority. Our longitudinal analysis highlights the pivotal role of the state in the liberalization of governance by showing how audit oversight privatization was not only enabled by, but also provided a condition for, the strengthening of government actors. We introduce the term 'legislative layering' to denote the mechanism that enabled public actors to redeploy themselves in the face of the rising market logic to ensure continuity in their regulatory objectives.