10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17099
application/pdf
2038-3460
17099
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Orazio Giancola
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork Lomell and Svein Hammer (eds.), The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society, Routledge, 2010
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
4
Book Reviews
2013-07-12
2023-06-02
2013-07-12
2023-07-17
196-198
TS
Orazio Giancola
2013/07/12
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17099
196
University of Roma “La Sapienza”
2038-3460
1
en
198
Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork Lomell and Svein Hammer (eds.), The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society, Routledge, 2010
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17099/16035
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196                                                                Tecnoscienza - 4(1)

way that appears to be flexible, ambivalent, restive and exposed to tech-
noscientific and marketing logics that are strongly intertwined together.

References
Clarke, A. E., Mamo, L., Fishman, J. R., Shim, J. K. and Fosket, J. R. (2003) Bio-
    medicalization: Technoscientific Transformation of Health, Illness, and U.S. Bi-
    omedicine, in “American Sociological Review”, 68 (3), pp. 161-194.
Conrad, A. (2005) The Shifting Engines of Medicalization, in “Journal of Health
   and Social Behavior”, 46 (1), pp. 3-14.
Foucault, M. (1963) Naissance de la clinique. Une archéologie du regard medical,
   Paris, Presses Universitaires de France.
Lock, M. L. and Farquhar, J. (eds.) (2007) Beyond the Body Proper: Reading the
   Anthropology of Material Life, Durham, Duke University Press.
Sunder Rajan, K. (2006) Biocapital. The Constitution of Postgenomic Life,
   Durham, Duke University Press.
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Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork Lomell, Svein Hammer
(Eds.)
The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society
London, Routledge, 2010, pp. 314
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Orazio Giancola University of Roma “La Sapienza”
      !
    To read a book like The Mutual Construction of Statistics and Society
for a social research methodologist who works daily with numbers, pro-
ducing them, analyzing them, and then providing – sometimes – policy
indications, is an interesting experience. This both for the estrangement
approach, and the language and style of argumentation. Furthermore, this
book forces us to deal with the “unsaid” and “taken for granted” typical
in the use of “big data” or official data collected and organized at various
levels, when using socio-economic indicators as those produced by na-
tional or international organizations, as well as large scale dataset based
on big social surveys.
    The construction of samples, of instruments created for data collec-
tion and their organization in matrix ready to be analyzed, their publica-
tion in the form of reports and indicators often used as a tool for “evi-
dence-based” policies is a set of operations at the same time autonomous
and connected with each other.
Book Review                                                                197
     The networks of interaction between these phases and among the dif-
ferent actors, human and technological, involved in the process of data
creation, have important effects on social life; to borrow the title of the
book, in this mutual construction, the “experts” and the technicians (but
also the discourses and the rhetoric that drive the research in a direction
rather than another) build statistics which, in turn, through the processes
of categorization and objectification, produces the “society”.
     Statistics is everywhere. It permeates our daily lives, and often we do
not realize it. The book edited by Ann Rudinow Saetnan, Heidi Mork
Lomell, Svein Hammer shows where and how a variety of statistics,
through a series of human decisions, becomes an “objective” description
of the “society”.
     The book is divided into four parts, the first (Overarching Themes
and Approaches) related to the technical aspects and the role of statistics,
techniques and indicators (especially in the processes of government); a
second part (Visibility, Invisibility and Transparency) relating to how sta-
tistics shapes individual differences creating real social categories (the
case of the definition of “ethnicity” and “racial” categories); the third and
fourth part are based on different case studies (Accountability and Man-
ageability; Reporting and Acts of Resistance).
     What is immediately clear is the power and limitations of statistics and
the dangers of it as a tool: these dangers lie in the routines through which
statistics are applied, the discourses from which they emerge and into
which they are deployed, the power relations created by those discourses,
and the assumptions which statistic categories carry with them in those
discourses.
     The key point is probably that statistics and technical tools related to
it (e.g. the difference between logistic regression and correspondence
analysis, pp. 52-55) are not theoretically “neutral” but they are “theory
laden”. These theories, when statistics is used as a classification tool, in
the activity of “governing by numbers”, in decision making and policy-
making processes, are sometimes not sufficiently taken into account. Sta-
tistics is a social product that responds to certain visions of the world, po-
litically, ethically, and epistemologically oriented; in the use of statistical
data, in their presentation, statistics incorporates these visions but they
become “opaque” or even “transparent” for a user not able to manage
the techniques or when a user decides deliberately not to consider them.
     Often statistics are seen as simple, straightforward, and objective de-
scriptions of society, but the way in which statistics and numbers are con-
structed, produced, gathered, and applied by different social organiza-
tions needs to be read, deconstructed, interpreted in its discursive, rhe-
torical and technical components.
     Statistics is reified, materialized through the coding and implementa-
tion of a database; it becomes a “not inert” socio-material object, instead
strongly characterized by its theoretical, ideological, technical and tech-
nological background. One of the key issues is that often statistics, indica-
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tors and different methods, techniques, artifacts or routines of production
and use, have the status of a “second nature” in which statistics is used as
a self-evident object. The authors clearly show that the use of a certain
technique of analysis incorporates a certain epistemic culture not auto-
matically visible, because embedded in a socio-technical object as a soft-
ware or an algorithm.
    If we look at the profound degree of theoretical and technological
“embeddedness” that permeates the tools of data collection (the example
of the “Response Rate Accomodation” is really interesting, see p. 73), it
becomes clear the powerful impact in terms of social effects produced by
the data now naturalized and taken as objective. This interpretive key is
fundamental to understand and underline the social nature of the data
produced daily in large quantities by many collective actors.
    One of the most important implications of this kind of use is linked,
according to some authors in the book (Svein Hammer, Asuncion Lera
St. Clair), to the neo-liberal strategies of government which rely heavily
on ‘statistics’, and more particularly, on socio-scientific expertise. Anoth-
er kind of implication is linked to the relationship between governmental
structures (at different levels, global and local) in the creation of official
numbers: for example, at global level, the diffusion and the progressive
power of persuasion of the OECD-PISA in the government of education.
Furthermore, at national or local level, the same thing happens for statis-
tics on immigration, on crime, or the categorization of the condition of
“health” and “disease”. Similarly to the process of categorization in eve-
ryday life, which allows the continuous production and reproduction of
the “social reality”, statistical categories define the status of an individual
in his relations with the State, the Law, or to a set of possibilities and ob-
stacles, rights and duties and also, as in the case of the definition of health
conditions, the self-representation or even the social stigma.
    The main contribution of the text is, in my opinion, on the one hand,
the invitation to reconstruct and always retrace the political and meth-
odological genesis of certain data before using them as a “natural” fact.
On the other hand, the need to consider the social effects that statistical
data can produce through a distorted or ideological use. The point is not,
therefore, a refusal of statistics that can be a powerful instrument to ana-
lyze large scale phenomena. Rather, a judicious use, self-critical and con-
scious of data and analysis techniques, being aware that these data could
be used to justify actions of policy-making, and construction of public
opinion, but also that they can have a strong effect on individual lives
through the process of categorization.
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