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- Convenors:
-
Anja Bauer
(University of Klagenfurt)
Helene Sorgner (University of Klagenfurt)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
As statistics have become central to governance, major efforts are devoted to their harmonization. How is the equivalence of statistical objects established across contexts, and on whose authority? The panel explores practices, politics, and consequences of harmonization across scales and domains.
Description
From measuring economies through GDP to tracking progress via the Sustainable Development Goals, societies increasingly rely on statistics to understand and govern complex social, economic, and environmental phenomena. To enable comparability, international organizations, national statistical offices, expert communities, and others devote significant efforts to harmonizing definitions, classifications, and methods across diverse contexts, jurisdictions, and time periods (Desrosières 2000, 2009; Espeland & Stevens 1998). Yet harmonization is neither purely technical nor frictionless; it raises questions of how and on whose authority the equivalence of statistical objects is established.
Building on growing STS and sociological interest in quantification, this panel invites conceptual and empirical contributions that explore the practices, politics, and consequences of statistical harmonization and standardization across scales (international, supranational, national, subnational) and domains (economic, social, environmental, health).
We invite papers exploring the governance arrangements that enable harmonization, from soft coordination by international organizations and Eurostat's auditing power to the interventions of expert communities and NGOs. We are equally interested in the concrete practices, infrastructures, and methods through which harmonization is achieved, including how statistical offices manage classification transitions and how digitalization reshapes harmonization work.
The panel welcomes contributions studying the effects of harmonization, such as how standardized statistics create new forms of visibility, comparison, and governance, while marginalizing alternative ways of knowing; how they reproduce global power asymmetries; and how harmonization relates to broader processes of Europeanization and globalization. We also invite papers on resistance to and failures of harmonization, from states defending national traditions to counter-statistical projects, indigenous data sovereignty movements, and civil society efforts that challenge dominant frameworks.
Both historical and contemporary perspectives are welcome, from tracing the implementation of major standards like the System of National Accounts to examining how recent crises (COVID-19, economic shocks, climate change) have accelerated or contested demands for statistical standardization.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
China's citizen scientific literacy statistics were initially modelled on international frameworks. This paper traces their de-harmonization, arguing that the indicator's growing political stakes drove its departure from international standards.
Paper long abstract
The harmonization of definitions, classifications, and methods has been a central preoccupation of international statistical governance. The scholarship examining how comparability is constructed often operates on the assumption that harmonization tends to deepen over time, moving from looser toward tighter integration. In contrast, the reverse process has not been sufficiently theorized: how and why statistical indicators might become disentangled from their international frameworks. My paper addresses this phenomenon through an analysis of China’s citizen scientific literacy (CSL) statistics, tracing their development from initial wholesale adoption of an international measurement framework in the 1990s through successive phases of localization. Specifically, I draw on official survey reports and technical appendices, scholarly debates within China, and interviews with researchers involved in CSL measurement, to reconstruct both the governance arrangements that enabled this trajectory and the concrete practices through which de-harmonization was achieved, including changes in threshold definitions, question bank composition, and calculation methods. I argue that China's de-harmonization was driven by the indicator's growing political importance: as CSL rates became official targets in national science popularization work – central to China's ambition to become a leading science superpower by 2035 – authority over measurement shifted from international expert communities to Chinese bureaucratic and scholarly institutions, and claimed international equivalence narrowed from substantive methodological alignment to rhetorical assertion. In conclusion, the Chinese case reveals an overlooked dynamic: that deep national investment in an indicator, precisely because it raises the political stakes of measurement, can actively incentivize de-harmonization rather than consolidate international coordination.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the making of cause of death data, showing how certifying physicians and registering coders deal with tensions arising between the logic of medical practice and statistical classification systems and how standardization attempts involved in data production work in practice.
Paper long abstract
Official statistics is a form of knowledge production organized by and for the state, where specific statistical offices or other government agencies collect, register, disseminate and compare statistics for depicting and governing matters of public importance. The “cooking” of such data can be organized and take place in various ways (cf. Biruk 2018), and has received relatively limited attention within STS. Official cause of death statistics is part of public health work; used for understanding the prevalence and trends of causes of mortality and fatal diseases and for evaluating preventive measures and health care systems. The World Health Organization has promoted standardization for classification and reporting to make such data comparable, but the logic of this terminological and procedural standard contrast with how physicians’ approach death. By exploring how physicians certify causes of death and how their reports enter administrative systems, this paper presents what happens when the worldviews of clinical practice and statistical reasoning meet. Based on interviews with physicians reporting causes of death and coders at the National Board of Health and Welfare in Sweden, we show how these groups deal with tensions arising in relation to reporting and coding and how standardization attempts involved in production of cause of death data work in practice. We also reflect upon the relationship between data and reference, given these conditions of production.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how statistical harmonisation enabled EU anti-poverty policy despite limited competences. Harmonised statistics made poverty comparable across Member States while masking national differences, enabling EU-level coordination and constructing poverty as a shared European problem.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how statistical harmonisation and comparative indicators enabled the emergence of EU anti-poverty policy despite the Union’s limited formal competences in this area. While poverty reduction remains primarily under Member State authority, EU institutions have gradually constructed a supranational policy space through harmonised data systems and comparative indicators that render national situations commensurable.
Drawing on STS and the sociology of quantification, the paper conceptualises these arrangements as part of a calculative infrastructure – a socio-technical system of datasets, statistical procedures, indicator frameworks, and benchmarking interfaces that enable the production of comparable knowledge across national contexts (Bowker & Star 2000; Kurunmäki et al. 2019). Rather than treating harmonisation as purely technical, the analysis shows how it emerged through negotiations among the European Commission, Eurostat, national statistical offices, and policy actors over definitions, methods, and measurement.
The paper traces this development from early attempts to compare poverty across EEC countries in the late 1970s to harmonised survey data and EU-wide indicators linked to common policy targets. Central to this process was output harmonisation, which allowed Member States to retain autonomy over national measurement while producing comparable results. While enabling comparison, this arrangement also obscured methodological differences between national statistical systems.
The analysis argues that EU anti-poverty policy emerged through calculative pragmatism, a compromise between comparability and national autonomy. Through processes of commensuration (Espeland & Stevens 2008), these metrics made poverty visible as a European problem and enabled forms of governing at a distance shaping policy debates without direct legal authority.
Paper short abstract
Foregrounding the roles of standardization and commensuration, I trace the development of the international poverty line. I pay particular attention to how the poverty line has captured the popular development imagination and show how it shapes the goals and practices of development.
Paper long abstract
What does it mean for someone to be “impoverished” or to live "in poverty"? Since 1990, the answer has been surprisingly concrete: a person is impoverished if they live on less than a specific dollar figure a day This is determined by researchers at the World Bank, updated periodically, and applied uniformly across every country on earth. This figure, the International Poverty Line, is the primary global benchmark for monitoring extreme poverty, tracking progress toward the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, and guiding development aid. Rarely does a discussion of global poverty occur without it.
In this paper, I trace its development as a statistical object. I examine how researchers at the World Bank transformed poverty from a context-dependent phenomenon into a single, globally applicable threshold. I show that the poverty line functions simultaneously as a standard, coordinating action across heterogeneous actors and institutions, and as a commensurative device, collapsing the diverse experiences of poverty into one comparable figure. I continue by arguing that the poverty line has come to anchor a shared horizon of measurable, technical progress that shapes which interventions appear legible, which populations remain visible, and which forms of poverty fall outside the frame of global action entirely. The paper concludes that the poverty line does not merely measure a pre-existing social reality but actively constitutes it, with significant consequences for how development is practiced and what it can achieve.
Keywords: poverty, measurement, standardization, commensuration, development, World Bank, quantification
Paper short abstract
What counts as economically valuable? We examine the standardization of digital data as assets in the 2025 UN System of National Accounts revision, analyzing how expert negotiations produce new international conventions that redefine GDP and economic value.
Paper long abstract
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a central measure in economic policy and debate. The international standard for calculating GDP, the United Nations’ System of National Accounts (SNA), has recently been revised after an extensive consultation process. One major innovation concerns the conceptualization of digital data as economic assets. Since existing asset categories do not apply to digital data, this revision requires the creation of new international conventions that re-define economic value and our understanding of “the economy”.
Our contribution focuses on conceptual and methodological negotiations through which a standard definition of data as an asset is produced and justified. This standardization effort raises several questions: how to define data, how to delineate data from other R&D investments, and how to distinguish economically viable “long-lived” from “short-lived” data. It also concerns the contested boundary between what is and is not economically productive, or, as one practitioner provocatively asked, whether cat videos should contribute to GDP. The assetization of digital data may have far-reaching implications for their governance and legal status (Birch, 2024). It will also increase GDP and its growth rate in countries with large digital sectors, further exacerbating politically relevant differences in “economic prosperity”.
Focusing on the ontological and knowledge politics involved in creating new international statistical standards, we discuss how these questions have been addressed in the 2025 SNA revision process. We analyze documents produced by expert groups, test reports by national statistics offices and exploratory interviews with practitioners to understand how new conventions defining economic value are made.
Paper short abstract
This article analyzes how scholars, institutions and firms make sense of, enact and represent China’s authority in international cybersecurity standard-setting. Drawing on Chinese language sources and three empirical examples, the article contributes to debates on the politics of standardization.
Paper long abstract
China has successfully become a “standard-maker” – a country that actively sets and shapes international technical standards for a range of industries. What does this mean for China’s position in global governance? This article analyzes practices of standards internationalization in the cybersecurity sector that enact and represent China’s authority towards domestic and international audiences. Drawing on Chinese language sources and other documents, it introduces China’s academic debate on the internationalization of cybersecurity standards and examines a practice-centered case study of the authority of cybersecurity standards in China’s automotive industry. Three examples illustrate the different mechanisms of China’s authority in international standardization: participatory deference, pre-promulgated deference, and regulatory deference. The article contributes to recent debates on authority in international standardization by theorizing – against the intersubjectively constructed field of international standardization – the conditions of how standards are recognized as authoritative in the first place.
Paper short abstract
Using examples drawn from population census protests, technical specifications of personal identification numbers, and software for electronic identification platforms, I argue that analyses of symbolic representations help us understand the politics of technical representation in digital systems.
Paper long abstract
In this talk I analyse three technical representations of humans as aggregates and as individuals—the population (aggregate life), the identification number (comparable individuals), and the online profile (individuals rich in distinctions)—using perspectives from STS, political theory, and the history of statistics.
In STS literature, the concept of representation features in discussions of performativity and enactment, especially in connection to the question of whether a sign represents an a priori existing object or if it brings the object into existence. In The Politics of Large Numbers (1998), Desrosières identifies a similar configuration when he argues how statistics stabilises things so that they may be changed, and changes things so that they may be stabilised. Representation is also a key concept for political theorists who generally assume that it describes a relation where humans represent humans but do deal with instances of symbolic representation (e.g. the flag representing the nation) which involve non-human entities.
Using examples drawn from population census protests, technical specifications of personal identification numbers, and the software that animates electronic identification platforms, I show how these constructs create equivalences and draw distinctions along the same lines, but stabilise different social facts at different scales. I conclude with how the concept of symbolic representation helps us understand the politics of technical representation in digital systems.