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Making Things Quantitative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Theodore M. Porter
Theodore M. Porter
Affiliation:
Department of History University of California, Los Angeles
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Abstract

Quantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of quantification in science, social science, and bureaucratic social and economic policy are analogous in important ways to accountancy.

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Science in Context , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1994 , pp. 389 - 407
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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