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Explores the proliferation of indicators and the resulting transformations in entanglements between social science, markets and politics in public life.
List of contents
1. Introduction: a world of indicators: the making of governmental knowledge through quantification Richard Rottenburg and Sally Engle Merry; 2. The flight of the indicator Theodore M. Porter; 3. Narrating numbers Wendy Espeland; 4. By their own account: (quantitative) accountability, numerical reflexivity and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa Johanna Mugler; 5. Failure by the numbers? Settlement statistics as indicators of state performance in South African land restitution Olaf Zenker; 6. Doing the transparent state: open government data as performance indicators Evelyn Ruppert; 7. Charting the road to eradication: health facility data and malaria indicator generation in rural Tanzania Rene Gerrets; 8. 'Nobody is going to die': an ethnography of hope, indicators, and improvisations in the provision of access to treatment in Uganda Sung-Joon Park; 9. The role of indicators in the global financial crisis Andrew Farlow; 10. New global vision of microfinance: the construction of markets from indicators Barbara Grimpe; 11. Spirits of neoliberalism: 'competitiveness' and 'wellbeing' indicators as rival orders of worth William Davies; 12. Climate change vulnerability indicators - from noise to signal Till Sterzel, Boris Orlowsky, Hannah Förster, Anja Weber and Dennis Eucker; 13. Retroaction: how indicators feed back onto quantified actors Alain Desrosieres.
About the author
Richard Rottenburg holds a Chair in Anthropology at Martin Luther University of Halle, Wittenberg, Germany. His research focuses on the anthropology of law, organization, science and technology (LOST).Sally Engle Merry is Silver Professor of Anthropology at New York University and a faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at the New York University School of Law.Sung-Joon Park is a lecturer at the Institute for Anthropology of the University of Leipzig.Johanna Mugler is a lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Bern.
Summary
Indicators simplify complex issues and produce numeric evidence to guide and justify decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes constituting quantitative knowledge or its effects on public ordering practices. This book shows how technologies of quantification change our modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways.
