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The Sociology of Quantification: Where Are We Now?

A decade ago, Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens published an essay titled ‘‘The Sociology of Quantification.’’ In it, they wrote that ‘‘sociologists have generally been reluctant to investigate [quantification] as a sociological phenomenon in its own right.’’ While accountants, anthropologists, and historians had begun the reflexive study of numbers, ‘‘sociologists have paid relatively little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement’’ (Espeland and Stevens 2008:402). That has clearly changed. While Google Scholar shows only nine results for the phrase ‘‘sociology of quantification’’ through 2007, the last decade returns 448. This proliferation of scholarship on numbers goes hand in hand with a proliferation of numbers themselves. New technologies have created a ‘‘quantified self,’’ and the explosion of the internet has produced ‘‘big data.’’ As a senior sociologist recently quipped to one of us, sociology has become quantitative researchers and qualitative Caring Capitalism: The Meaning and Measure of Social Value, by Emily Barman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 226 pp. $99.99 cloth. ISBN: 9781107088153.