The geography of statistics: Social statistics from moral science to big data

Abstract

Statistics are central to the state’s capacities. However, with the advent of ‘big data’ some argue it is being undermined in favour of a new configuration of corporate power. We need to understand statistics both historically and geographically to understand how it is intertwined with the geography of power today. Three strands to the geography of statistics are proposed: the geography of statistical institutions and agencies; the geography of ‘datafication’; and the geographies produced by statistics. Tracing the geography of statistics demonstrates its role in the construction of a hierarchical world and explains the consequences of changes in statistical practice.

The subversive practice of counting bodies: Documenting violence and conflict in rural Brazil

“…Who chooses what gets counted, in what ways, and how does this allow one to govern? The practice of producing numbers and data about society (Prince, 2019) is closely related to statecraft itself. According to Foucault (2007), it is a constitutive element of the modern state and its way of governing.…”

“…Simultaneously, the state became empowered by this very practice, as it became the sole entity capable of engaging vast resources to collect, process, and use wide‐ranging, accurate, representative, and reliable data (Porter, 1986). As a ‘technology of power’ in the Foucauldian sense (see Behrent, 2013), statistics helped determine the character of social facts and shaped ideas and classifications in social sciences (Hacking, 1991; Prince, 2019).…”

“…To conclude, whereas there is a need and an opportunity for the broader use of numerically expressive data in resistance (Plummer & Sheppard, 2001; Sheppard, 2001), the landscape of engagement and the resulting political opportunity structures are changing. The digital age and big data (Prince, 2019) are representatives of the promise that all the knowledge is ‘out there’ and thus supposedly ‘made available’ to ‘everyone’. If before data were obscured by not being counted, now in the digital age of big data, they are made obscured by being hidden within excessive, continuously produced, ever‐expanding amounts of data (Kitchin, 2014).…”

Professions and their expertise: Charting the spaces of ‘elite’ occupations

“…It intersects with a related body of work on the production of scientific and technical knowledge in complex organizational settings (e.g. Amoore, 2018; Barry, 2013; De Goede, 2012; Essex and Carmichael, 2016; Müller, 2012; Prince, 2019). 4 Taken together, these literatures illuminate the operation of specific policies or policy instruments.…”

“…They also indicate that professionals have some room for maneuver – some autonomy – within organizations. Russell Prince (2019: 4) for example, speaks of ‘the statistical enterprise’ – the set of ‘institutions, agencies, networks, texts, databases, and calculative devices that are populated by statistical experts and practitioners’ – to highlight the co-constitution of all these phenomena. Alex Jeffrey (2019a: 2) speaks of the ‘fundamental autonomy’ of law as ‘a closed system of knowledge and practice’.…”