An Agenda for STS

In 1997, Ted Porter was awarded the Ludwik Fleck Prize for his book Trust in Numbers. Since its publication, the book has received more than 40 reviews and many citations in scholarly journals, newspapers and magazines. It is an innovative and programmatic work, and deals with topics and views central to the field in new ways. Exploiting the advantage of being late, this Review not only examines Trust in Numbers, but also looks at its reception.1 Many reviewers like the book, but some despise it. Why? And what is its relevance to the STS agenda? Trust in Numbers is divided into three parts and nine chapters. The middle part consists mainly of historical case studies in which the emergence of quantitative and standardized forms of measurement is explored for various countries, for various periods of the 19th and 20th centuries, and for a range of practices. Porter presents us, for example, with the story of 19th-century British actuaries who successfully resisted outside pressures to make explicit the criteria on which they based their decisions. In a subsequent chapter, their success is compared with the failure of 20thcentury US accountants to resist similar pressures. Why did the US accountants fail where the British actuaries succeeded? This sort of question is repeatedly raised. In Chapter 6, for example, Porter explores the ways in which French civil engineers dealt with the economic implications of public works. Like the British actuaries, they were under pressure to transform expert judgements into a set of rules that could be applied 'objectively'. Porter explains their success in terms of their organization as a professional elite firmly integrated into the centralized French state