Social Research articles from June 2001

Social Research archives from June 2001

Editor's Introduction.
June 22, 2001... This issue on "Numbers" covers ground that has been explored many times before, but it is a process that probably cannot be exhausted. For a journal that lives in a social science faculty, the decision to organize this issue seemed long...

How Real Are Statistics? Four Possible Attitudes(*).
June 22, 2001... REFERENCE to "reality" is a commonplace among both producers and users of statistics. This "reality" is understood to be self-evident: statistics must "reflect reality" or "approximate reality as closely as possible." But these two expressions...

Counting the Affects: Discoursing in Numbers.(innovations in computer systems)
June 22, 2001... ON the MIT Affective Computing Laboratory website (http://www.media.mit.edu/affect/), computers and humans are realizing new modes of human-affective machine interactions. Computer-enhanced technologies measure, quantify, and identify emotional...

Governing by Numbers: Why Calculative Practices Matter.
June 22, 2001... SOCIOLOGISTS are busy rediscovering the economy (Callon, 1998; Fligstein, 1990; Granovetter, 1985). The roles of networks that connect and form agents figure large in this revival of interest in the market as a social institution (Callon, 1998:...

For Everything Else, There's ...(analysis of commodification)
June 22, 2001... IF you watch network television, you have probably seen the commercials. A man and a boy are going to a baseball game. The camera closes in on the boy's expectant face, then on the glove he pounds enthusiastically. We hear a voice-over: "Two...

Measure for Measure: How Economists Model the World into Numbers.
June 22, 2001... Only a further development of the engineering skill of econometrics will help in this respect (Tinbergen, 1959 [1936]: 84). But technique is interesting to technicians (which is what we are, if we are to be of any use to anyone)... (Lucas,...

Social Measurement: What Stands in Its Way?
June 22, 2001... When you cannot measure * your knowledge is * meager * and * unsatisfactory. -Lord Kelvin (inscription carved in 1929 below the bay window of the Social Science Research Building of the University of Chicago) who cares if some one-eyed...

The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses.
June 22, 2001... Introduction PRINCES, kings, and emperors have collected information about their populations in some form for millennia. Whether it is the biblical references to census taking, the Domesday Book, the Florentine Catasto (Herlihy, 1985), or...

Numbers of Earth: The Labor of the Intellect in Nature.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... The Other Earth At first we embrace trees. Lie with the swan, the bull, become stars. Blackbirds form bridges across the sky: we pass, lightly placing our feet. The god enters our rooms in a shower of gold. ...

Manipulation and Population Statistics in Nineteenth-Century France and England.
June 22, 2001... THE status of statistics has shifted radically in the past 30 years. Whereas professionals and politicians once held up statistics as a guarantor of political neutrality and social scientists embraced them as evidence of scientific objectivity,...