The Values of Quantification

Standardized forms of knowledge, such as systems of measurement and money, and the formal arithmetic taught in school, may be thought of as attempts to dominate the definitions of the situations of their use and forms of knowledge in practice. Ethnographic research on middle class American adults shopping in supermarkets, managing family finances, and trying to lose weight in a dieting organisation suggest, rather, that calculation and measurement procedures are generated in situationally-specific terms which both reflect and help to produce the specific character of activities in daily life. At the same time, the values embodied in the standarised forms of quantitative knowledge discussed here, especially values of rational objective utility, appear to be resources employed expressively in everyday practice. A politics of knowledge is thus embodied in mundane transformations of knowledge and value through activity constituted in relation with its daily settings.