From statistics to "accountings".

How Desrosières’ perspective suggests

to change the focus on the figures that rule the world
Fabrice BARDET, Université de Lyon, ENTPE
bardet@entpe.fr

Summary
The title of the book commemorating Alain Desrosières, The Social Sciences of Quantification: From
Politics of Large Numbers to Target-Driven Policies (forthcoming), echoes the evolution of his career.
Indeed, he was first known for being a sociologist of statistics and then considered a sociologist of
quantification later on only, when he explicitly shaped and launched this discipline in France. The
turning point was the publication of his seminal book, Politics of Large Numbers, in 1993. From that
point, he worked primarily on the sociology of accounting, which was situated alongside the
sociology of statistics, but had no links to it yet.
To further my understanding this disconnection, I studied the history of Accounting, Organizations
and Society (AOS), the oldest and most famous journal in the sociology of accounting. In this way I
discovered the meeting, in the early 1990s, between AOS leaders and Ted Porter, who was then
Desrosières’ alter ego in many ways. Several papers and a book were subsequently published, which
bear witness to the fruitfulness of the meeting. But the convergence with the sociology of statistics
was not fostered in AOS columns. It was when I looked for the reasons why, that the hypothesis of
the accounting counter-revolution came to mind. Statistics and accounting are not only academically
distinct. Their epistemologies must also be distinguished, as well as their embeddedness in societies
and in public policies. Statistics certainly invaded societies in the 19th and early 20th centuries (a
phenomenon known as the “Probabilistic Revolution”), but we are now facing another kind of
avalanche of numbers, which are more “accountings” than statistical measures. The accounting
counter-revolution hypothesis provides a way to think about contemporaneous forms of government
which are no longer dedicated to the identification of collective long-term public problems, but
rather to individual and day-to-day accountabilities. It is particularly important to grasp this turn as
“big data” are invading organizations and society at large in the digital age.
This paper first analyzes the LSE project, which was formulated by Anthony Hopwood and Peter
Miller, and designed to make a junction with the sociology of statistics. It secondly synthesizes the
work of Ted Porter, Alain Desrosières and Wendy Espeland in this respect. Finally, it presents the
logical and the analytical qualities of the accounting counter-revolution model. The paper suggests
that a new kind of quantification can be identified to characterize the contemporary period, one
which prolongs the advent of “governing life” in the 20th century, pictured by Peter Miller and Nikolas
Rose.

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Introduction
Numbers have ruled the world, for ages. But for the past century at least, they have become such a
massive phenomenon that a “quantitative obsession” has been identified (Sorokin 1933) an
escalating “quantophrenia” is increasingly often deplored (de Gaulejac 2009 (2005); Paquet 2009). In
fact it is likely to continue, with the perspective of a big data society lying ahead. Indeed, big data
means more quantification, and more numbers to govern (ourselves).
Sociological studies conducted in the past decades to analyze “numbers that govern” and their
precise effects on governing practices, progressively led to the emergence of the sociology of
quantification, a kind of “quantitative data science”, before the emergence of “data science” that is
identified and discussed today. But under this useful title, we have to distinguish two different
academic fields that have been fed by two specific dynamics, born simultaneously in the early 1970s:
the sociology of accounting and the sociology of statistics. Concerning the sociology of accounting,
the academic dynamic has been very fast, in line with the development of academic journals inside
the accounting field, linked to different analytical and often critical perspectives or schools, either
behaviorist, or Marxist or Foucaldian. At the heart of this critique, the sociological field has been used
largely as a way to modernize the accounting field. In fact, the oldest and probably most famous
journal, Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS), was, from the very beginning, an accounting
journal and not a sociological journal of accounting. When it was launched, in 1976, the goal of its
founding father, Anthony Hopwood, was explicitly to promote the tools of organizational sociology or
public policy analysis in the accounting field. This is an important reason why what we can today call
the “sociology of accounting” has always been deeply linked to the managerial sciences developed in
business schools.
The sociology of statistics, on the other hand, is much less institutionalized, because there was no
academic journal to support its development. And it is seldom found in the core set of Master’s
programs in statistics, even in France where the discipline has grown rapidly in the past few decades
(Desrosières 1995; Desrosières 2008b). So, far from the academic field, the sociology of statistics was
enriched by essentially individual enterprises linked to widely diverse academic disciplines. Some of
the founders were fostering a philosophy of science or history of science perspective (Daston 1988;
Hacking 1975; Krüger, Daston and Heidelberger 1987). Later, a huge amount of research was
conducted from a more sociological historical perspective (Anderson 1988; Desrosières 1993;
Desrosières and Thévenot 1988; Porter 1986). This perspective has progressively been widened to
include several social science disciplines: demography (Cussó 2003; Le Bras 1986), sociology and
sociological economics (Armatte 2001; Espeland 1998; Gadrey and Jany-Catrice 2005; Salais 2004),
and political science (Bardet 2000; Bruno 2008; Pierru 2007). In this evolution the French school,
under the impetus of Alain Desrosières, has been especially active and decisive in the making of
several junctions (Bruno, Jany-Catrice and Touchelay 2015 (à paraître)). But the equivalent of what
boosted the development of the sociology of accounting does still not exist in the sociology of
statistics.
Several scholars from both traditions have tried to connect these separate sociological fields. One
famous and seminal event in this regard occurred in 1990. The AOS editorial team at LSE, which at the
time was a strategic center for the sociology of accounting, took the initiative to invite Ted Porter,
then a rising specialist in the history of statistics and probabilities at international level (Porter 1986;
Porter 1989). The meeting led to the first collection of papers, but they played against the merging

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dynamics, for they focused on all the differences between accounting quantifications and statistical
quantifications, which were all potential causes to explain the distance between respective
academies. This surely explains why the editors of AOS rapidly stopped their investigations in the
direction of a junction with the sociology of statistics, as I will explain later.
On the sociology of statistics side, Ted Porter deepened his research and published one of his most
famous books, Trust in Numbers (Porter 1995), while Wendy Espeland worked at spreading the
notion that she defended in her thesis: the generalization of budgetary commensuration that often
avoids major social dimensions in public policy evaluations (Espeland 1992; Espeland and Stevens
1998). In such circumstances, Alain Desrosières, watchful of this merging Anglophone literature,
launched new investigations in the French context, first with his friend Michel Armatte (Armatte and
Desrosières 2000), and then with a team based at the renowned HEC School, that was then
developing the sociology of accounting in France (Chiapello and Desrosières 2006; Chiapello and
Ramirez 2004). More profoundly, he initiated and supervised several projects conducted by a young
generation of researchers, on objects situated at the interface between statistics and accounting
(Bruno and Didier 2013; Eyraud 2013; Lemoine 2015; Touchelay 2011).
The junction is however still very fragile today, probably due to the lack of a common dialectic able to
ensure the link between these distinct forms of quantification. In this perspective, a review of the
history of past attempts appears useful to foster such a junction. This was my goal in embarking on
the study of the history of AOS in its early days (Bardet 2014). It provided the title of this history: “the
accounting counter-revolution” (ACR), which suggests an historical dialectic between contemporary
accounting and previous statistics put in first place by the “probabilistic revolution” initiated in the
20th century. This notion sheds light on the dynamic that led to Porter’s invitation at the LSE in 1990,
as well as the immediate abandonment of the transversal perspective (1). It also offers an
explanation of why sociologists of statistics continued the work (2). These two first outputs lead to
another one: the ACR hypothesis is useful for more fully apprehending the forms and effects of all
these “accountings” that today invade organizations, public policies, and also private life (Power
1996). More precisely, it fits with the historical perspective of forms of government that established
the rise of the “governing life” model in the 20th century (Mennicken and Miller 2012; Miller and Rose
1990), and leads to identify the beginning of the new “governing everyday life” model.

In search for a connection with the sociology of statistics

LSE invited Ted Porter in 1990 for several reasons. First, the AOS editorial line had changed under
Anthony Hopwood, and the journal had adopted a more historical and archeological approach to
accounting tools, inspired by Michel Foucault’s work. In this perspective, the history of statistics, the
other main form of quantification mobilized by governments, seemed to offer an easy field for a joint
venture with the AOS. Moreover, in the emerging field of sociology of statistics, Ted Porter appeared
to be the rising scholar at that time, and also the one who already signaled strong interest in
accounting or financial quantification.

AOS’s first dynamic

Anthony Hopwood obtained his PhD in Chicago, at the end of 1960. His research allowed him to
observe the American accounting field reform that was enforced at national level and was aimed at a
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stronger link with economic activity. He also closely followed the numerous controversies that took
place at the Chicago Business School in the context of the reform. Several objectives were at stake:
the project was to make accounting more rational, in the shadow of what was going on in the
neighboring discipline of economics, where micro-economics was emerging, and to connect
accounting to the rising organizational studies. The launch of the Journal of Accounting Research
(JAR) was the result of these two objectives. But very soon the behavioral accounting dimension, on
which Hopwood had done his PhD, disappeared from the JAR columns, and back in the UK Hopwood
kept in mind the vacant space left by the JAR’s new editorial line.
After then joining the Business School of Manchester, Hopwood developed rich friendships with
several colleagues working on a critical perspective on accounting that was predominantly Marxist. It
fed his idea that a place was vacant in the accounting academic editorial field. In 1976, Hopwood
joined Oxford University where he found all the means to launch the journal he had been thinking
about for years: Accounting, Organizations and Society (AOS).
From the beginning, the AOS editorial line was primarily related to Hopwood’s American experience,
which had influenced him profoundly. The first Editorial Committee clearly illustrates this. In order to
organize the link between accounting and the social sciences, two famous scholars in organizational
studies and public policy analysis were invited to site on the committee: Chris Argyris, one of the
main rivals of Herbert Simon, the Nobel laureate and founder of organizational studies, and Aaron
Wildavsky, the renowned specialist of budgetary processes in the United States. A year later, the
editorial of the first anniversary issue confirmed and clarified Hopwood’s project: American sociology
of organizations and public policies was one of the main focuses of AOS.
AOS’s dynamic was fostered for years by this initial project. And indeed, Hopwood finally succeeded
in convincing his colleagues from the accounting field to connect with it and to discuss sociological
literature (Boland Jr. 1979; Boland and Pondy 1983; Covaleski and Dirsmith 1983). On the other hand,
he never really succeeded in persuading sociologists to work on accounting. Thanks to his amazing
power of persuasion, he was able to convince John Meyer and James March to sit on the AOS
committee, although it did not facilitate accounting’s entry into political science. The papers that
Meyer and March published in AOS demonstrated their ongoing distance from the accounting reality.

Foucaldian networks

In the meantime, Hopwood left Oxford and joined the London Business School (LBS). His new
position in London afforded him the opportunity to connect with a very dynamic network of
colleagues passionate about Michel Foucault’s work. One of them, Stuart Burchell, was a colleague at
LBS. Together they published two seminal papers in AOS, as the one arrived and the other left LBS,
five years later. The comparison between them offers a useful perspective on AOS’s “Foucaldian turn”
in the second half of the 1980s. Moreover, this turn from public policy analysis to the archeology of
government tools provided the platform for the prospection that AOS leaders were going to initiate in
the sociology of statistics.
Through Burchell’s network and that of his brother (a philosopher), Hopwood became acquainted
with Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose. Both were working on the institutionalization of psychology and
psychiatry and the rise of social programs dedicated to mental illness (Miller and Rose 1986; Rose
1979). In this network, Hopwood also met Ian Hacking whose work offered him his first encounter
with the sociology of statistics and probability (Hacking 1981). Peter Miller also instigated research

4
dedicated to the history of French National Accounting (Miller 1986), and Hacking kept on working in
the history of statistics. Interested in the scientific revolution model of Thomas Kuhn (Hacking 1983),
Hacking participated in the coordination of a huge international workshop that took place in Bielefeld
in 1983-84 and led to the publication of the famous book The Probabilistic Revolution, a collection of
an impressive number of studies dedicated to the transformation – in relation with the probabilistic
paradigm victory – of every sector of economic or administrative activity (Krüger, Daston and
Heidelberger 1987), as well as every academic discipline (Krüger, Gigerenzer and Morgan 1987), from
mathematics to the socials sciences.
The audience of this monument in the history of science triggered a particular dynamic in the
sociology of statistics. In the following years, several major books were published that all contributed
to the foundation of this academic discipline (Daston 1988; Desrosières 1993; Hacking 1990; Porter
1986). In Bielefeld’s group, Ted Porter was an eminent scholar of the rising generation. Hopwood saw
this historian at UCLA as a link with the western schools of organizational studies and political science
in which he was keenly interested. Porter was moreover also one of the very few American scholars
interested in the European context and scientific literature in his field. He had already published a
huge amount of European book reviews, with books published in five different languages. So he was
somehow at the crossroads of Foucaldian networks, American social science academia, and the
sociology of accounting or economic sociology. For this reason, he seemed to be the perfect
correspondent for connecting the AOS group with the rising sociology of statistics.

The short-lived bridge between sociologies of quantification

In 1986, Hopwood had joined LSE’s Department of Accounting where he enjoyed new resources to
develop his journal. He seized the opportunity to hire two young colleagues, Peter Miller and Mike
Power, who also quickly joined the AOS committee. It was moreover also to LSE’s Department of
Accounting that Ted Porter was invited for a “one-week tenure” supported by the consultancy group
Arthur Andersen. For members of AOS’s editorial team, the meeting with Ted Porter led to several
important outputs. And for the sociology of statistics, it may have been even more important.
For Porter himself, this meeting was a way to open new fields of research in accounting
quantification, in which he produced two papers (Porter 1992b; Porter 1994). In the first one, he
defended the idea that accounting was a great field for sociology, even if sociologists of science often
preferred “fundamental sciences”, to which they granted more value (Porter 1992b). In the second
one, he developed his research program suggesting that quantifications had to be considered as a
whole, or at least together (Porter 1994). The latter paper announced the publication of his seminal
book Trust in Numbers (Porter 1995). The core idea, in the prolongation of the article, opened very
broad perspectives. Covering different fields in different countries, at different times, and focused on
different professions (engineers, actuaries, accountants, etc.), the book offered a transversal analysis
based on a general hypothesis: quantification could be a tool for professional groups to defend
themselves in difficult and delegitimizing contexts. Such a perspective was also the result of lengthy
reflection (connected to the philosophical field) that Porter has been feeding for years in relation with
the work of his friend Lorraine Daston (Porter 1992a; Porter 1993).
The connection initiated with the sociology of statistics by the meeting with Porter was far from being
ineffective on AOS’s scientific agenda. A few months later, Nikolas Rose published his first article in
AOS, in which he offered an in-depth review of two books dedicated to the sociology of statistics,
published in the USA. They allowed him to draw a broad picture of this unfamiliar field for AOS
5
readers, suggesting a structural dichotomy between the European tradition and the American one,
which was more pragmatic and less political (Rose 1991).
Mike Power may have been the only member of the AOS team to strongly reshape his scientific
agenda subsequent to the meeting with Ted Porter. Working on the development of audits in
organizations and public policies, he decided to pay specific attention to the international controversy
that had arisen a few years earlier in the auditing sector over the decision to integrate statistical
techniques of sampling into auditing procedures, or not, in order to make them more scientific or
rational (Power 1992). In this respect, Power maintained a strong relationship with Porter for several
years and invested in the publication of a collection that included papers from both sociologies of
quantification (Power 1994; Power 1996). But his own perspective on probabilistic tools in accounting
procedures was very quickly undermined because of the decision of accounting authorities in the UK
to refuse these changes, even though the situation was very different in United States where it was
still seen as a way to make auditing more rational. Mike Power surely felt that since the British
corporation of accountants had refused the probabilistic turn in professional practices, the junction
with the sociology of statistics had lost one of its most interesting dimensions.
In France, the LSE meeting that had initiated the first connection, albeit brief, between the two
sociologies of quantification (statistics and accounting) was not immediately known. Although Alain
Desrosières was paying close attention to the work of Bielefeld’s group of scholars, especially Ted
Porter, and to that of Peter Miller, who had worked on French national accounting (cf. infra), the AOS
dynamic remained largely unknown at the time in this country. However, 1990 was also the year
during which Alain Desrosières published his first paper in English (Desrosières 1990), and the main
question at the heart of this article, “How to make things that hold together?” was going to trigger
the first meeting between Desrosières and Porter. However, this connection was to be made only a
few years later. The time lag was probably long enough to slow down potential collaboration or cross-
fertilization that the LSE initiative could have created, but also to foster an international dynamic that
was going to keep alive the wish to bring the twin sociologies of quantification together.

First milestones for a sociology of quantification

While the junction with the sociology of statistics did not appear as rich as members of Hopwood’s
team at LSE had first envisaged, accounting was identified more and more as a very interesting field
of research for sociologists or historians of statistics. I have already mentioned the great benefit that
Ted Porter had derived from his visit to LSE, and that had allowed him to formulate his hypothesis
that quantifications have to be analyzed together (Porter 1995). The audience of this work was large,
especially in the United States and in France where, respectively, Wendy Espeland and Alain
Desrosières were producing the first milestones in the rising sociology of quantification.

Espeland: To think the invasion of “commensurations”

When Porter published his papers following his visit to LSE, Wendy Espeland has just been recruited
by the Department of Sociology of Northwestern University in Chicago. She had completed her PhD
on the notion of commensuration related to a kind of quantification that, from her point of view, was
invading organizations and public policies (Espeland 1992). Her hypothesis was directly connected to
the field of her research: the project for a dam in Central Arizona, in which the cost/benefit analysis
6
required by government agencies faced a fundamental problem in evaluating the price of forcing the
Yavapai Indians off their ancestral lands. Commensuration catches the implacable will of
contemporary societies to measure everything on a same budget-oriented ladder. This sensitivity of
Espeland’s work to this budgetary dimension of contemporary quantifications probably stemmed
from her various investigations in collaboration with the NWU team that had been working for years
in collaboration with Hopwood, and that had published several articles in AOS (Carruthers and
Espeland 1991; Espeland and Hirsch 1990).
Deepening her reflection on the notion of commensuration, Espeland insisted, behind the social
process it represents, on this budgetary dimension and the standardization effects that such
quantifications produce (Espeland and Stevens 1998). In the latter article, she developed an historical
or archeological perspective that echoed the very old debate opposing different schools of
philosophy in Antiquity. But the contemporary dynamic was discussed less. Differences between new
forms of quantification, mostly monetary or budgetary, and old forms of quantification like social or
societal statistics, were less depicted than was suggested the importance to prolong Porter’s
perspective to think quantifications as a whole. The evolution of the power struggle between
different forms of quantification, for example between statistics and accounting, was nevertheless
underlying numerous sections of the article.

Desrosières: Thinking neoliberal quantification

Once again, Alain Desrosières was very cautious about these academic initiatives from the English-
speaking world. He therefore invited his students and colleagues to discuss the challenging
hypothesis from the perspective of the academic field of sociology (Bardet 1997). He decided to
revert to the study of national accounting on which several in-depth studies had been conducted
after the end of the WWII and that he had studied very carefully in the past, as national accounting
was an important element of the national statistical system of which he was the indisputable
specialist (Fourquet 1980; Margairaz 1991; Spenlehauer 1998; Terray 2003). The reputation of
Desrosières’ work had grown significantly, especially through his book on the history of French CSP
(i.e. “socio-professional categories”) that very often replace the use of income categories in the
French statistical system (Desrosières and Thévenot 1988). Being also a statutory administrator of the
French national institute of statistics (INSEE), he invested considerably in the history of government
administration, not only from a research perspective (Affichard 1977) but also in a more
administrative context (e.g. for the 50th anniversary event of INSEE (INSEE 1996)). So, with his friend
Michel Armatte, he went back to the history of the national accounting initiative in order to focus on
the description of distinct epistemologies at the heart in this past fieldwork, and potential
epistemological crossings between statistical science and accounting (Armatte and Desrosières 2000).
He thus identified a first turn that occurred between the first objective, consisting in “measuring the
national product”, and the one that was finally chosen, to establish “national accounts”, from a
perspective more similar to classic accounting for a private firm (Armatte 2010).
Alain Desrosières then undertook his collaboration with Eve Chiapello who had just published, with
another friend of his, a book analyzing the transformation of management texts that could reveal a
new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello 1999). The remarkable success of the book enabled
Eve Chiapello to escape business school academia where she already had a prominent position, to
enter the heart of sociological academia. Very quickly, Desrosières and Chiapello together worked out
how to join their respective perspectives to develop a sociology of accounting, and more broadly to
7
imagine connections with the sociology of statistics. They organized the “First international
conference for the sociology of quantifications”, in Paris in 2002 (Chiapello et al. 2002). Ted Porter
was the keynote speaker of the first session, dedicated to the sociology of statistics, while Peter
Miller was that of the second session, focused on the sociology of accounting. For editing the papers
presented in the latter session (Chiapello and Ramirez 2004), Eve Chiapello worked with her
colleague at the HEC Business School, Carlos Ramirez, who had developed a sociology of audit firms
(Ramirez 2003). Desrosières was highly enthusiastic about the collaboration with the HEC team and
deepened his collaboration with Eve Chiapello. He engaged in work entirely distinct from the field of
statistics, dedicated to the history of the controversies around Positive Accounting Theory that stirred
the accounting field in the late 1970s (Chiapello and Desrosières 2006) and the objective of which
was to turn accounting away from its normative perspective (Jeanjean and Ramirez 2009).
For Desrosières, the main objective of his new research in connection with accounting was obviously
to identify new kinds of quantification able to feed his historical framework that associated forms of
government with corresponding types of quantification (Desrosières 2000). He had encountered
some difficulties to inform his last column concerning quantifications related to the neoliberal form of
government characterizing contemporary societies. In this perspective again, he found a new way to
feed this last column of his panorama in reading the PhD thesis of Isabelle Bruno (he was a member
of her PhD jury in 2006) on the development of benchmarking processes in European Union
administrations (Bruno 2008). He saw figures from the “Open method of coordination” launched by
the European Union at the Lisbon summit in 2000 as an archetypal form of contemporary
quantification that were fundamentally distinct from those mobilized in the context of social policies
implemented by Welfare States in the 20th century. Despite the official presentation, Desrosières was
convinced that these figures, focused on budgetary implications, matched the neoliberal agenda. In
this light, he formulated the project to found an historical sociology of quantification (Desrosières
2008a) that would go beyond the sociology of statistics on which he had been working for several
decades. He moreover encouraged Isabelle Bruno to go on with her research, and provided support
by coordinating a seminar on this topic at the EHESS (Bruno and Didier 2013).
In the same dynamic, Alain Desrosières also paid particular attention to the transformation of
national State administrations with the development of efficiency indicators. These indicators were
intended to improve the management of huge government organizations, especially in the health
sector (Pierru 2009), but were also, more broadly, related to the reform of the budgetary process
(Eyraud 2013), and the financialization of national debt management (Lemoine 2015). Desrosières sat
on a huge number of PhD juries in this perspective. However, being careful not to mix together all
kinds of quantification, he was reluctant to feed his historical grid systematically with all the
quantifications that he was invited to discuss. Even if hybridization was at stake, the title of his grid
remained oriented towards “statistics” rather than quantifications. Despite convergences between
statistics and accounting, distinct epistemologies seemed to slow down the connection. Desrosières
therefore suggested that a deeper investigation into the sociology produced by critical accountants or
sociologists of accounting, especially those engaged in the AOS, might be useful. The AOS history that
we began together a couple of months before his health suddenly declined (Bardet 2013) and to
which he gave much thought, contributed to nourishing our endless discussions in a new way.

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Governing Everyday Life: Outcome of the Accounting Counter-Revolution
AOS offers a unique observatory of the invasion of our societies by accounting tools in the past forty
years. Created when these accounting tools were implemented in the public sphere, after having
been restricted to the private sector for decades, AOS provides the first historic delimitation of this
movement. It also allows us to grasp the impressive diversification of forms of accounting that have
occurred in the recent past, until today when everything seems to be counted at both a collective and
an individual level, from a long term perspective and in real time. And more broadly, the history of
AOS affords an opportunity to look at the development of this accounting in relation to the evolution
of the other main form of quantification of social or economic phenomena: statistics. The latter
underwent a remarkable development during the 19th and 20th centuries, highlighted by historians
who have labeled it the “probabilistic revolution”. But this development may have reached a kind of
limit, especially with regard to the ongoing development of accounting. In fact, some analysts of the
growing digitization of societies, describing the advent of big data, suggest that sampling techniques
could be a “vestige” of past societies. The debate is being opened among professionals of
quantification (statisticians, accountants, IT engineers) as to who is going to rule in big data society.
But one thing is already certain: statistics has lost its monopoly in quantitative tools of government.
This also suggests that we have entered a new era in which forms of government are even more
intrusive than in the previous situation already characterized by “governing life” ambitions. By
mobilizing analytical models built by Desrosières on the one hand and by Miller and Rose on the
other, it appears to be possible to draw the outline of contemporary forms of government aimed at
“governing everyday life”.

The invasion of “accountings” in organizations and public policies

AOS founder Anthony Hopwood was doing his PhD in Chicago when the project of importing
accounting tools into public administration was devised by the Nixon administration. Back in the UK,
as an expert he was requested by the government to reproduce those changes that were finally
adopted by the Democrat administration in the US (Hopwood 1985). In that situation, Hopwood was
in favor of a sociological and historical analysis able to identify all the political grounds for such
change. That was why it was so important for him to have Aaron Wildavsky, the main American
sociologist of budgetary processes, join the AOS committee. From the first issues of the journal, some
papers were dedicated more broadly to the influence of political transformations on the accounting
academia. One question, for example, was whether accountants should seize the opportunity of
policy evaluation development to extend accounting practices and markets (Birnberg and Gandhi
1976). Hopwood was aiming to help accounting to take a strategic position in the ongoing
transformations (Hopwood and Tomkins 1984).
From the outset, behind this goal directly linked to the timing of the AOS kick-off, the journal
promoted research giving an historical perspective to the development of accounting tools in
organizations and public policies. Series of articles were published in AOS dedicated to the
implementation of activity indicators, especially in the educational sector (Boland and Pondy 1983)
and the health sector (Covaleski and Dirsmith 1983; Covaleski, Dirsmith and Michelman 1993;
Preston, Chua and Neu 1997). Such publications led to a debate, inside AOS columns, on the
profound consequences of these transformations in political systems. John Meyer, one of the main
scholars of the neo-institutionalism school in public policy analysis, published a paper in AOS in which
he identified the advent of a form of administration with generalized benchmarking procedures (even
9
if he did not use that term) and in which a number of undesirable consequences were likely to follow
(Meyer 1986).
The invasion of these new forms of quantification went even further with the growing importance of
auditing practices. Audits consist of ad hoc evaluations of firms or organizations’ financial health,
conducted by specialized consultants that are supposed to warranty a clear independence with
regard to the audited firm. The auditing sector, strongly linked to accounting, has enjoyed escalating
growth rates in the past decades. In the mid-1990s Mike Power diagnosed the advent of “the audit
society” (Power 1997).
Before coining this successful term, Power had worked on the invasion of all kinds of accounts in
organizations, some of which were far from classical accounting procedures. In order to describe
explicitly this diversity and this distance from traditional accounting, he had also come to suggest
another term, when talking about the invasion of “accountings” (Power 1996). The success of this
term was much more modest, probably because it referred to a diversity of phenomena whose
common characteristic was not easy to encapsulate. However, the term was equally useful to
conceptualize the turn that might have occurred in the 1990. Quantifications, which increased in
organizations during the 1990s, exceeded traditional accounting that presented all of a year’s
financial transactions. The aim was more broadly to observe all activities within an organization, in
precise details concerning facts and the moves of every agent, at every level of the organization.
Efficiency, efficacy of all activities, times, well-being or suffering at work: everything was calculated or
evaluated. Comparisons and rankings were then made between services and agents within the
organization, on the basis of which they received distinctions and prizes or, on the contrary, criticism
or blame.
Alain Desrosières was wondering how to integrate these accountings in his historical grid of statistics
forms. Proposing the term “accountings”, Mike Power raised the question as to whether these
accounts could be labeled “statistics” or were rather linked to traditional accounting. In order to
progress, it seemed important to develop a sociological perspective that looked carefully, in firms and
organizations, at who did the counting. Most of the time, it appeared that new forms of
quantification were seldom produced by statistical services or other scientific experts in charge of
analysis or strategic planning. On the contrary, these numbers were very often produced by the
agents themselves or by managers, auditors or accountants appointed to manage services. Moreover,
whereas statistical analyses were produced in autonomous ways, new accountings were part of the
day-to-day activity of these services. From an analytical perspective, production of accountings did
not lead to specific consideration being shown to the representativeness of collected data, or to
errors associated with probabilistic estimation. And in the same way, uses of such data also changed.
While statistical measures favored long-term and structural analysis of problems, accountings
suggested immediate exploitation by managers, who had to be reactive to operate the yield
management in real time so that they could maximize the organization’s profitability. These
differences between contemporary forms of quantification and statistics that prevailed during the
20th century suggest the need to prolong both grids shaped in complementary ways, in Paris by
Desrosières and in London by Miller and Rose.

A new era in “Governing Life”

Developments in London, where Anthony Hopwood arrived at the end of 1970s, were to introduce a
noteworthy change in the editorial line of AOS. Although the journal was, from its launch, clearly
10
aligned with American organizational sociology or public policy analysis, in the 1980’s it began to
publish more and more articles with an historical and critical perspective. Initially linked to a Marxist
school and to relationships that Hopwood had formed when he was in Manchester, from the mid-
1980s, most of these articles adopted a perspective stemming from the research program developed
by French philosopher Michel Foucault. This development, that had already been identified as the
AOS’s “Foucaldian turn” (Gendron and Baker 2005), was shaped in London where an informal
Foucaldian network was especially productive and influenced Hopwood’s enterprise. It was at the
heart of this network that Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose developed their thinking that led to the
identification of the “governing life” era in the 20th century. Looking back to the content of this
analysis and connecting it to the current invasion of accountings in organizations, encouraged by big
data, I wish to prolong the historical perspective drawn by Alain Desrosières.
AOS’s Foucaldian turn led to the publication of a wide range of articles describing the invasion of
contemporary societies by accounting in diverse forms, from highly classical forms of accounting to
specific forms such as those concerning education, especially the generalization of examinations
(Hoskin and Macve 1986) and the development of cost accounting (Loft 1986; Miller and O’Leary
1987), as well as certain types of financial accounting (Miller 1991). All these researches set current
trends not only in a long-term perspective (some of them going back to Antiquity) but also in a
contemporary one, for example in relation to the success of New Public Management.
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose played a key part in this dynamic. Working for a long time on the
development and institutionalization of psychology and psychiatry in the 20th century (Miller and
Rose 1986), they identified a turn that occurred in forms of government, from old forms that Michel
Foucault summed up as “government at distance”, to more modern ones in which individuals’ lives
were organized, more directly and sometimes violently, by what could be the core of social programs
in Welfare States (Miller and Rose 1988; Rose 1990), or even Keynesian economic policies (Miller and
Rose 1990). The “governing life” formula, directly associated with Foucault’s perspective on the
emergence of bio-power in neoliberal societies, was highly successful and became a totem for AOS’s
Foucaldian period.
But because AOS’s junction with the sociology of statistics was not complete (cf. supra), the direct
connection between the advent of the “governing life” paradigm and the probabilistic revolution was
not really emphasized. It would nevertheless be interesting to associate the two in order to deepen
the analysis of contemporary dynamics in quantification policies. Some pioneering works tried to
identify the role of probabilistic science development in the rise of the insurance private sector, or
recently the social public sector at the heart of the so-called Welfare State (Ewald 1986; Pfeffer and
Klock 1974; Zelizer 1983 (1979)). But they did not lead to a real debate in the social sciences, for
puzzling reasons. Within the sociology of statistics, at first, the lack of discussions may have been
related to the very modest success of the probabilistic revolution paradigm, in connection with the
importance of the findings of the Bielefeld seminar. In the Bielefeld group itself, possibly because of
the way it echoed a structural rift in the sociology of science, the notion of probabilistic revolution
was quickly abandoned and replaced by another that also encapsulated the invasion of statistics: the
empire of chance (Gigerenzer et al. 1989). But the contemporary conjuncture could afford the
opportunity to reassert the link.
By retrospectively associating “governing life” with a probabilistic paradigm, we are able to grasp
more fully the particularities of contemporary societies characterized by the invasion of this specific
kind of quantification that are “accountings” – because, most of the time, accountings have nothing
11
to do with probabilistic quantifications. For this reason their development constitutes a break in the
dynamic that lasted throughout the 20th century. We must be careful not to conclude that conquests
made by the probabilistic revolution suddenly disappeared. On the contrary, the world of finance, at
the heart of economic as well as political power, keeps going, perhaps more than ever, dominated by
bell-shaped "normal" Gaussian curves (Taleb 2007). And other strategic conquests by the probabilistic
revolution are alive and well, in the form of insurances or probabilistic quality tests in industrial firms.
But some careful observers also insist on the fact that new experts such as accountants, auditors,
private equity managers, or business lawyers, all far from being scientists or specialists of
probabilistic tools, are gaining new positions in international financial regulation policies (Lorrain
2011).
In this perspective, the notion of an accounting counter-revolution affords a way to think dialectically.
Accounting’s conquests can be described better if they are opposed to statistical conquests that
occurred in the 20th century. While yesterday’s statistical quantifications designed the world of the
“average man” (we would say today “average human”), in a structural perspective, accountings are
more about giving an instant valuation of the efficient individual and showing them as an example to
their colleagues or congeners (as in benchmark procedures that are now generalized in private firms
and in public administrations), in the hope that others will be able to react and adjust their strategies
or positions in real time.

Conclusion: Acceleration produced by big data

At a time when the advent of big data is being diagnosed, the long-term and discreet battle between
statistics and accountings could take on new dimensions. Some observers consider, too readily, that
new capacities to stock data could invalidate the old ambition of probabilistic science to grasp the
whole by studying a part, thanks to sampling techniques (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013). On
the other hand, and certainly just as quickly, statisticians would like to think that time has come for
their profession to rule the entire world of data science, which could be the new label for statistical
science1.
Refusing to bet on the possible results of the coming power struggle, I want to highlight the richness
of a perspective that analyzes the rivalry between quantification professionals that are (at least)
statisticians, IT engineers, and accountants (managing as well as financial accountants). It is very hard
indeed to imagine the expertise of one of these groups finally prevailing over the others. Some very
serious bets have been made in the past, for more than twenty-five years (with the advent of the
computer age), that have finally been challenged by facts (Duncan 1987). But the dialectic between
statistics and accountings or between measures and enumerations appears to be a pragmatic tool for
observing and analyzing coming battles between quantitative data sciences that aim to rule the
world.

1
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/lists-and-rankings/best-jobs/2015-big-data-statistics-canadas-hottest-job/

12
Fabrice Bardet is a political scientist and senior researcher at the University of Lyon. He is a visiting
professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA), Sciences Po, Paris. He wrote his PhD under
the supervision of Alain Desrosières (2000) and worked with him for years, especially from the
organization of the “First International Forum for the Sociology of Quantification” held in Paris in
2002, to that of the workshop “Back to the Experimenting Society? Historical and Interdisciplinary
Perspectives” held in Lyon in 2011. His book, The accounting counter-revolution, published (in French)
in 2014, draws on his last conversations with Professor Desrosières.

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