Abstract
This piece introduces the four papers written for the history section of Science, Numbers and Politics. It outlines some of the problems that confront writing historical sociologies of quantitative information, focusing on the historicity of the rules that shape the production and usage of statistics. It then presents short prefatory remarks on the papers.
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Notes
- 1.
Desrosières (1998, 7–8).
- 2.
Desrosières’s book is primarily about the emergence of “the social” and “social facts” across the nineteenth century both as a statistical effect and in sociology, particularly through the work of Emile Durkheim.
- 3.
Bourdieu (2014, 9).
- 4.
Desrosières’s “Introduction: Arguing from Social Facts,” in The Politics of Large Numbers, pp. 1–16.
- 5.
See, for example, the history of cost/benefit analysis in Ted Porter’s Trust in Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) or recent work in the sociology of accounting on international accounting standards.
Bibliography
Botzem, Sebastien. 2012. The Politics of Accounting Regulation: Organizing Transnational Standard-Setting in Financial Reporting. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2014. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France 1989–1992. Malden, MA: Polity.
Desrosières, Alain. 1998. The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Porter, Theodore. 1996. Trust in Numbers. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Grotke, K.L., Hastings-King, S. (2019). Historical Genesis of the Relation Between Science, Numbers and Politics—Part I Introduction. In: Prutsch, M. (eds) Science, Numbers and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11208-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11208-0_2
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