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.

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.Andrea Mennicken is Associate Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, and Co-Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (LSE), UK. Robert Salais is Associate Researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris-Saclay, France, and member of the Institutions and Historical Dynamics of the Economy and Society (IDHES) Centre, France.

“Numbers, though often taken to be dull and predictable, are foci of power and contestation, never more so than in our own time.  Sober and austere in appearance, in use they often surprise us. The papers in this collection display some of the many dimensions of numbers in action, from planning to neutralize economic disorder to reshaping of governments to mimic private markets.  If numbers sometimes really have become dull, reliable, and routine, they may suddenly be transformed into vital springs of protest and activism.  Democracy and bureaucracy alike are practically unthinkable without data banks of numbers.  Although a total history of numbers and their uses is impossible, these essays provide at least an illuminating sample of their multifarious functions and failings in the contemporary world. And, against all expectations, the stories can be enthralling.” (Theodore M. Porter, Department of History, UCLA. Author of Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life) 

This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access Scrutinizes the relationships between quantification, administrative capacity, and democracy across different policy sectors and countries Offers unique cross-national and cross-sectoral insight Covers how managerialist ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted and how they have come to matter

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