Measure and Value

Issues of measure and value are emerging as central in current debates concerning the capacity of social science and cognate disciplines to engage contemporary social and cultural life. Debates on the restructuring of time, scale, number, pattern and sequence, for example, as well as those on the changing character and properties of data, evidence and the empirical, point to a need for a re–evaluation of the conventions, devices and practices of measure and value in the social sciences and humanities. Do we need new forms of measure? And what do different forms of measure do? This Sociological Review monograph addresses these and related questions to place issues of measure and value at the core of contemporary social science debate.

Series editor s introduction (Chris Shilling)

Introduction: special measures (Lisa Adkins and Celia Lury)

1. A flank movement in the understanding of valuation (Fabian Muniesa)

2. General Sentiment: how value and affect converge in the information economy (Adam Arvidsson)

3 The changing lives of measures and values: from centre stage in the fading disciplinary society to pervasive background instrument in the emergent control society (Helen Verran)

4. Transactional politics (Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage)

5. Dirty data: longitudinal classification systems (Emma Uprichard)

6. The economy of social data: exploring research ethics as device (Ana Gross)

7. Measuring the value of sociology? Some notes on performative metricization in the contemporary academy (Aidan Kelly and Roger Burrows)

8. Measure, value and the current crises of sociology (Nicholas Gane)

Notes on contributors

Index

Celia Lury is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.