CAMARGO--Alexandre-de-Paiva-Rio--HIRATA--Daniel-Veloso--LIMA--Renato-Sérgio-de.-Quantification--State-and-social-participation--heuristic-potentials-of-an-emerging-field.-Sociologias--Porto-Alegre--v.-23--n.-56--p.-20-40--Jan-Apr-2021..md

Quantification, State and social

participation: heuristic potentials

of an emerging field

Summary

The article presents the analytical perspectives of the sociology of quantification, highlighting its potential to revisit theoretical debates and empirical issues that cross different fields, with an emphasis on violence and public safety, ethnic-racial relations, education and social movements, themes of the articles that make up this dossier. The aim is to map its emergence and still incipient development in the country and demonstrate how its frame of reference can be used to address, from a new angle, some of the central problems of Brazilian society, such as police lethality, racial inequality and the selective school system. and discriminatory. Contemporary forms of quantification are examined , their effects on social agency, their points of contact and their differences in promoting neoliberal rationality, a concern shared by the contributions gathered and reviewed here.

Keywords: quantification, State, neoliberalism, social participation.

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Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo*

Daniel Veloso Hirata*** Renato Sérgio de Lima**

• Candido Mendes University, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. ** Fundação Getúlio Vargas, São Paulo, SP, Brazil. *** Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.

20 Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo, Renato Sérgio de Lima & Daniel Veloso DOSSIER20 Hirata

http://doi.org/10.1590/15174522-113100

Machine Translated by Google Quantification, Quantification, State and social social participation: participation: heuristic heuristic potentials potentials of an emerging emerging field 21

Keywords: quantification, State, neoliberalism, social participation.

The article presents the analytical perspectives of the sociology of quantification, highlighting its potential to revisit theoretical debates and empirical issues that cross different fields, with an emphasis on violence and public security, ethnicracial relations, education and social movements, which are subjects of the articles that compose this dossier. It seeks to map the appearance and still incipient development of the sociology of quantification in the country and demonstrate how its frame of reference can be used to address, under a new angle, some of the central problems of Brazilian society, such as police lethality, racial inequality and the selective and discriminatory school system. Contemporary forms of quantification, their effects on social agency, their points of contact and differences in the promotion of neoliberal rationality are examined, a concern shared by the contributions gathered and reviewed here.

Sociologias, Porto Alegre, year 23, n. 56, Jan-Apr 2021, p. 20-40.

This dossier aims to present and strengthen the emerging field of sociology

Quantification, State and social participation: heuristic possibilities for an emerging field

Abstract

Brazilian social issues, in contributions brought together for the first time in a thematic issue of a Portuguese-language magazine. In this approach, statistics matter not as a scientific method or discipline, but as cultural objects, artifacts that result from social practices of classification, registration and comparison of different dimensions of reality, developed by public and private institutions. Figures, indicators, indices, percentages, rates and averages make up the arsenal of proof and inference of technical and scientific elites, going beyond the scope of application for which they were initially created, to become categories of perception for multiple actors. Your

of quantification and its analysis perspectives in the sciences

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The interest for the social sciences lies in the fact that they transcend

purely mathematical language and acquire a public character. These are

numbers that “receive media attention, translate interests of different

social groups, provide arguments in the resolution of controversies, are

subject to diverse appropriations, lend themselves to erudite and lay,

theoretical and practical uses, being constantly readapted and resignified” (Daniel, 2013, p. 12).

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As they are public, these numbers give consistency to aspects of reality considered socially problematic, but which are still diffuse and controversial. They reveal opaque or invisible dimensions of reality and the social bases of politics, the very essence of political sociology. The investment in statistical forms makes it possible to stabilize what is already present in the collective sensibility, but has not yet been agreed, giving dimension and scale to what until then could only be perceived in words, that is, qualitatively. For this reason, the quantification of social facts is an important – and, until recently, neglected – part of the processes of reproduction and transformation of modern societies.

Over the last forty years, studies on quantification have been formed from reference works in different areas. In a somewhat abbreviated form , we point out some of the main ones. In historical epistemology, works on the role of probability calculation and the notion of risk in the formation of the human sciences and in the rationalization of social life stand out (Daston; Krüger; Heidelberger, 1987; Hacking, 1990; Porter, 1995). Studies in Science, Technology and Society brought contributions on the role of numbers in public controversies and in the imposition of the definition of situation by “calculation centers”, such as the laboratory (Latour, 1988; 2000).

Studies on identity, race and ethnicity revealed the role of censuses and their classifications in establishing new categories of people (Anderson, 1988; Anderson, 1993; Kertzer; Ariel, 1999; Loveman, 2014).

Machine Translated by Google This is just one case of the more general trend pointed out by Boltanski

(1982) and Desrosières (1993) that, to gain recognition, groups are

interested in statistically institutionalizing categories compatible with their aspirations. More recently, we witnessed a similar process in the attempt by

some French social scientists to introduce the category “precarious

intellectuals”, encompassing different cultural professionals, whose moral

greatness would be affected by the precariousness of work and the advance

of an increasingly utilitarian way of life (Tasset, 2014 ). Both

In turn, the reflections of the Anglo-Foucauldians on the regimes of

government and population management addressed statistics as a technology for the production of “free” and calculating subjects, by providing

actors with norms and standards for their own aspirations and conduct

(Foucault , 2008; 2009; Rose; Miller, 1992; Rose, 1999; Miller, 2001; Dean,

1999). Finally, under direct inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu (1979), the

French pragmatism debate on equivalence conventions and the plurality of logics of action (Boltanski, 1982; Desrosières, Thévenot, 1988; Boltanski,

Thévenot, 1991) provided a model to address the simultaneously real and

conventional character of statistics and its correspondence with different

modalities of criticism (Desrosières, 1993; Boltanski, 2009).

Taken together, these works called into question the performativity of

numbers in public and private life; its use as a social coordination tool ; its effects on the distribution of resources, knowledge and opportunities; its

reactivity on people, transforming the ways they think and act about

themselves, alone or in relation to others. After all, the conversion of qualities into quantities creates new things and new names, making certain

identities more real than others.

Although it originated from a solidarity movement between engineers and

administrators in the late 1930s, its existence only became formalized when

it became a statistical nomenclature in mobility and stratification analyses.

One example is the construction of cadres, a term that designates salaried executives and which is fundamental to the occupational structure in France.

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Machine Translated by Google The examples above point to the heuristic potential of studies on quantification in renewing interest and approach to themes dear to the sociologies of work and stratification. Another important front opened by the sociology of quantification concerns the illumination of the statistical work of public agencies, such as INSEE, in France, the Census Bureau, in the United States, or IBGE and SEADE, in Brazil. In them, the space for creating work programs and research agendas is directly linked to bureaucratic microprocesses and power networks that determine what can and what should be part of the attention list of public statistical agencies, in which the technical domain gains great relevance. The negotiation of a research program involves, in this sense, not only the conviction of its political pertinence, but its technical viability, which depends on the conceptual soundness and the networks of use that make statistics stable and resistant to criticism (Desrosières, 2008).

To understand the work programs of statistical agencies, it is necessary to analyze the clash of professional “truths”, who prefer to focus on primary research, whose rules, techniques and methods can be fully controlled (Lima, 2010). Data generated from administrative records are seen with great caution and, therefore, left in the background – with the exception of some economic and financial data

More than that, the repertoire of technical-scientific knowledge effectively available in these agencies proves to be decisive in the incorporation of new themes into their research agendas, demanded by economic actors and social movements. Such is the case, for example, of the pressures for expanding the strictly economic concept of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which today involve the inclusion of domestic work, biodiversity and other forms of wealth compatible with social and sustainable development. This helps to explain why institutions that produce statistics seem more reluctant to quantify more fluid themes, whose legal and conceptual bases do not exist or remain in dispute (Comte, 1995).

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo, Renato Sérgio de Lima & Daniel Veloso Hirata 24

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Quantification, State and social participation: heuristic potentials of an emerging field 25

public, which help to compose and construct relevant indicators for the IBGE

agenda, such as national accounts. However, contemporary forms of

objectifying reality pose considerable methodological challenges to the

production of knowledge. For Lima, new technologies, combined with

processes of compartmentalization and hyper-specialization of knowledge,

generate complex scenarios – data in increasingly greater quantities;

fragmented information that is not always capable of validation and/or

confirmation, as in the example of the Internet and fake news; instant

communication, social networks, among others – which are not capable of

being apprehended just through the use of traditional techniques for measuring

reality. In this process, public statistics agencies often find themselves without

references on the agenda of topics covered in a national or regional statistics

system and, as a result, end up reinforcing positions of institutional or even

methodological insulation (Lima, 2010 ).

The sociology of quantification not only allows us to understand the

social determinants of this isolation, but also shows the different actors and

organisms involved in the circuit of production, circulation and translation of

numbers that there are limitations and choices implicit in all statistical

procedures, insisting that it is impossible to offer technical solutions to conflicts

of interest that cannot be accommodated. Furthermore , the sociology of

quantification offers producers of statistical information reflective knowledge about the effects and constraints of their practices, which has the advantage

of expanding their sociopolitical legitimacy, without compromising their

technical-scientific credibility (Camargo, 2009).

When presiding over the IBGE, Simon Schwartzman dedicated himself to

thinking about the translations that take place in statistical controversies,

taking into account the specific professional culture of data producers, guided by rules

Interestingly, the first wave of Brazilian works that today would easily fit

into the sociology of quantification were written by authors with academic

activity and who, at the same time, integrated or directed the main data

production agencies in the country. His concerns about the division of

statistical labor reflected this insertion.

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and mixed values of science and bureaucracy, in an approach that is partly Latourian and partly Mertonian (Schwartzman, 1999). Inspired by this author, Nelson Senra, an IBGE researcher, focused on producers in institutional spaces, highlighting the importance of understanding who provides statistics and how this process is carried out. His work examined how statistics are strained by the process of distinguishing between what he called the “supply time” and “demand time” of information. There would be here two antagonistic discursive fields, which dispute an object for its ability to be counted or, on the contrary, for its intrinsic individualities, that is, conflicts over what to count and quantify, which cannot be completely accommodated (Senra, 2005). The doctoral thesis by Renato Sergio de Lima (2005), who was head of SEADE's division of socioeconomic studies, showed

how the pressure for public control of police actions in redemocratization did not result in coordination between producers and users of criminal statistics, leading to to a simultaneous and paradoxical movement of growth in the stocks of data generated, on the one hand, and the reinforcement of the opacity of numbers in the design of public security policies, on the other. More recently, the proliferation of contemporary forms of quantification, marked by the advent of “algorithmic governmentality” (Rouvroy, 2015) and the dissemination of benchmarking in the State and public service (Bruno; Didier, 2013), increased the interest of social scientists beyond official statistics, including in Brazil. Different initiatives have sought to demonstrate that the sociology of quantification can be used to address, from a new angle, some of the central problems of Brazilian society. In dialogue with historical sociology, the doctoral thesis by Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo (2016) examined the slow construction of the authority of numbers in Brazil and the conditions of its conversion into a reference for collective action. A process that, for the author, extends between the Empire, when administrative statistics predominated over population ones, reflecting the rationality of the Territorial State, and the First Republic, when interdependence was outlined

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Then, the thematic dossier “quantifying in Brazil”, the result of approaches between Brazilian and French researchers interested in the topic, was organized by Emmanuel Didier for the magazine Statistique et Société

On the one hand, the crossings that constitute the tension of statistics as

instruments of proof and government, including new forms of quantification that

establish the legibility and instrumentation of the government of territories and

populations, highlight a model of contemporary rationality based on risk, surveillance

and technology.

Policy choices are presented as results of standardized analytical techniques;

public services are commodified and monitored by the ability to satisfy a clientele

made up of citizens, in a relationship that is reduced to efficiency and utility,

emptied of the principle of universality and protection that until then characterized

the modern State-

(Didier, 2019). In various ways, the collective of researchers gathered tried to

show, following the seminal tracks of Alain Desrosières, but also of Theodore

Porter, how statistics are, at the same time, an instrument of proof and of

government (Desrosières, 2008). From this intrinsic tension to the “science of the

State”, it is possible, on the one hand, to understand how problematic it can be to

quantify favelas (Motta, 2019), how illegal markets are produced by numbers as a

problem to be fought in alliances between political and economic elites (Rabossi ,

2019), the generalization of predictive surveillance and its promotion by quantifying

intervention time (Cardoso, 2019), but also how the objectification of shootings and

police operations by civil society creates new debates in the public space,

previously hidden by the absence of numbers (Hirata; Couto; Grillo; Olliveira,

2019). The articulations, therefore, of the use of numbers as instruments of proof

and government, as well as different possibilities of thinking about the crossing

between State and society, allow exploring, through a renewed perspective, classic

themes of the social sciences and relevant public issues.

health and social aspects of the country, giving rise to a new regime of action over

the population.

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In the field of public security, for example, the difficulty does not lie in the production of criminal data per se, which have existed in Brazil since 1871, but in the way in which they are compiled and how they are mobilized to justify regimes of truth that aim to maintain practices that feed back from the violence. That is, when choosing either to add the deaths resulting from police intervention in the total number of registered homicides and/or, on the contrary, when choosing to exclude such deaths from this sum, there is, after all, a huge dispute about the which means law, order and public safety. The clash moves from production time to use time, in the idea that there is consensus that the numbers should be generated, but there is conflict over what they translate and who can have access to the details that would allow broader analyzes of the problem (Lima, 2005).

It can be said that the introduction of performance indicators was a considerable advance in relation to the so-called “bravery award” (better known as the “wild west bonus”), which, between 1995 and 1998,

This clash is reflected on several levels, such as, for example, the incentives for police activity carried out by the governments of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Since 2009, the Public Security Institute (ISP/RJ) organizes the data for the “System of Goals and Follow-up of Results”, based on the “Strategic Indicators of Crime”. The managerial strategy, conceived by private consultants, is to build performance indicators capable of inducing the action of public security professionals in a certain direction . On this point, the profusion of data from some of the large national and international NGOs and think tanks present in Rio de Janeiro also seek to create evaluation parameters for public policies, effectiveness regimes for actions and programs, through performance indicators , evaluation and rankings, typical of benchmarking (Bruno; Didier, 2013).

nation. On the other hand, intense mobilizations in civil society are

carried out through numbers, indicators and forms of classification that strain this standardized readability and punctuate the limits of civil rights violations.

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(Araújo, 2014).

They are characterized by automation in relation to conventions, escaping

the disputes of a public sphere that becomes opaque, guiding countless

decisions by governments and companies that empty the channels of democratic deliberation.

In dialogue with digital sociology, but demarcating its contribution, the

sociology of quantification draws attention to the political rationality that brings together or separates the different ways of quantifying in neoliberalism.

counted homicides resulting from police intervention as “productivity” to be

subsidized, thus increasing the lethality of police action during the period

(Cano, 1997). Despite progress, there seems to be a problem not only in

relation to the criteria on which performance indicators rest , but also in the

very use of indicators as government instruments. This is due to the known

problem of gaming (Bevan; Hood, 2006), the strategic game of actors on

such performance indicators and target systems, which seeks to control and direct their actions. Again, the case of Rio de Janeiro, in this regard, is

exemplary: when police lethality emerged as a public issue, the number of

missing persons began to grow in the same proportion as the number of “resistance acts” decreased.

In the case of algorithms and benchmarking, both are based on collecting,

Alongside the diffusion of benchmarking, its rankings and performance evaluations, the metrics of neoliberal governmentality pose other challenges to the public sphere and to democracy, which have deserved attention from social scientists. Algorithmic quantification is found in the application of mathematical models to population management. In this case, the massive circulation of microdata allows access to territories, groups, institutions, markets and countries in fractions of seconds. Automated knowledge emerges from correlations of non-previously selected, non-hierarchical and highly heterogeneous serial information , reducing human intervention and dispensing with hypotheses and conventions about the social world (Rouvroy, 2014). In stark contrast to official statistics, big data

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It is no coincidence that social movements have never acted as

much with statistics as they do today, as shown by the strong politicization of racial categories and the claim to quantify spaces that until recently were non-commensurable, such as biodiversity, forms of unpaid work ,

the participation in cultural consumption, racial inequality and genderbased violence. These are domains considered problematic, which are progressively objectified and constructed by the numbers as public problems, which makes it possible to transform collective sensibilities in relation to them, and to give institutional forms to experiences and aspirations until then fragmented and diffuse, thus contributing directly to social change.

The contributions gathered here address the production conditions and modes of use of official statistics and other contemporary forms of quantifying reality, especially benchmarking and performance evaluation by indicators and rankings, government devices that retroact on the actors and affect the constitution of subjectivities. In this reading, it is interesting to understand statistics as a technology for transferring risk to individuals, through which non- economic behaviors - such as criminality, police activity, judicial decisions, family life and social pathologies - are read by the analytical key of economics, through the quantification of human activities. At the same time, another perspective is equally necessary, as statistics are not and have not always been exclusive weapons of the powerful, their potential to challenge consensus and re-politicize social relations remains inexhaustible. Although there is a long tradition of using statistics to guarantee claims for rights, as in the most explicit case of indexing

aggregation and decentralized analysis of data, in order to model, anticipate and affect behaviors. This is a distinctive characteristic of quantification in neoliberalism, which promotes interaction between social agents and autonomous technologies to make them subjects of their own observation and classification, monitors of their sociability (Camargo, 2021).

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of salary and cost of living in union demands, some ways of intervening with numbers are quite recent, specifically aimed at attacking the methods of domination characteristic of neoliberal governmentality. It is important here to address the resistance of social movements when resorting to numbers against institutionalized powers, inequalities and the managerial management model. Numbers have political uses and are increasingly problematized and/or disputed, requiring constant epistemological vigilance over their methods and concepts so that they are not reduced to mere rhetorical resources in the construction of narratives typical of the post-modern era. truth and fake news. In this sense, the dossier intends to debate the transformations of the State and the modalities of social participation, from the point of view of their anchorage in public numbers and the political productivity of statistics, with the aim of uncovering new possibilities for criticizing the present and governing the present. future. As a starting point, the article “The social studies of quantification and its implications in sociology”, by Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo and Claudia Daniel, seeks to reconstruct the origins of the field and its transformations over recent years, drawing attention to the relationships between the sociology of quantification, the socio-history of statistics and, to a lesser extent, the anthropology of numbers. The author's objective is to stimulate a work program through which sociology should expand its attention to the operations and regimes of quantification in contemporary societies. And, to demonstrate this intention, they carry out a broad review of the literature and examine the

contributions accumulated in this literature that directly dialogue with the central questions of sociology, such as the problem of the foundations of social order and political authority; the processes of social differentiation and configuration of subjectivities; critique and transformative social agency. In the end, there is a call for a research program that, arising from the sociological method, highlights the effects produced by quantification devices between different social groups, and reveals the ways in which power relations operate through the opacity of numbers.

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In “The politics of a transformed data landscape: ethnoracial statistics in Brazil in a regional comparative perspective”, Mara Loveman examines Brazil's regional protagonism in overcoming the ethno-racial blindness that characterized Latin American censuses before the turn of the century. After outlining a historical panorama that reserves a prominent place for the census in the construction of the scientific-demographic fiction of whitening, the author addresses the growing politicization of the production of

Stativism is a neologism created by Isabelle Bruno and Emmanuel Didier to name the growing field of number-based activism practices in different parts of the world. If, in previous works, the authors sought to understand, in the wake of thought and joint work with Alain Desrosières, the specific type of quantification typical of neoliberal government (Desrosières, 2014), more recently they sought to shed light on how the different forms of action through numbers punctuate a resistance field. In the article that makes up this dossier it is quite clear that this opposition is nuanced in the oppositions and relations between State and society. Starting their typology of stativism, the authors identify practices that precede the neoliberal government or are located within it, therefore with varying critical range, radical or reformist – taking this distinction from Luc Boltanski. They also show that the circumvention of the rules governing

conduct imposed by the neoliberal government is done through a series of strategies of resistance to performance indicators , targets and rankings, typical of benchmarking, as in the case of police officers subjected to the famous Compstat, part of the project New York's "Zero Tolerance" They then describe the construction of new collective categories, such as those associated with the precarious work of artists and intellectuals in their demands for social and labor rights. And, finally, alternative public figures are reviewed, as is the case cited in the quantification of shootings and police operations in Rio de Janeiro, which make it possible to debate issues that were not previously present. As the authors say, not without humor, “other numbers are possible”, or other numbers help to institute other possible ones.

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Following this, the article by Samira Bueno, Renato Sérgio de Lima and Arthur Trindade, “When the State kills: challenges to measure crimes against life committed by police officers”, highlights in a very clear and historically situated way the difference and discrepancies between production of official statistical data and its use as a way of reading the instruments of the

numbers, starting in the 1980s, promoted by the coalition of activists, social scientists and international organizations, which pressured national statistical agencies to openly engage in the collection of ethnoracial data. The Brazilian experience is analyzed in detail as it serves as a model for other countries in the region, such as Colombia, Bolivia and Chile, where the composition of forces forged by epistemological and political alignment did not, however, have the same impact, due to reasons examined in the article . . Once institutionalized, ethnic-racial classification transformed politics throughout the region, giving rise to new spaces for the participation of groups of color, new subjectivities, driven by media campaigns that encouraged the recognition of African heritage and the consequent change in self-identification. , and new political demands. This situation produced new debates and tensions, such as the discrepancy between official categories, whose scope is considered too broad, and the objectives of policies to combat inequality, which result in distortions among beneficiaries. In turn, these tensions stimulate the

outbreak of controversies and reactive subjectivities, which are configured in opposition to official categorization and emerge with the nationalist discourse of the new right, which insists on the resubordination of ethnoracial identities to an atavistic Brazilian identity. In conclusion, the author proposes a theoretical contribution, an alternative to the image of the “looping effect” coined by Ian Hacking (1986), when referring to the recursiveness of statistical classifications on the reality they describe. In light of transformations in the political field, he suggests the metaphor of a “spiral effect” to account for the unpredictable consequences of the creation and ways of using ethnoracial data, which can be both positive and negative for the objectives of those who produce them.

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Natália de Lacerda Gil closes the dossier with the article “ Quality quantification : some considerations on school failure rates in Brazil”. Inserting herself in the literature on the role of rankings in the construction of excellence (Bruno; Didier, 2013; Espeland; Sauder, 2016), the author questions what is meant by quality in education, implicit in the methodological choices and procedures for quantifying the school performance, emphasizing the importance of analyzing the image of efficiency that the indices seek to measure and promote. To this end, the article relates the search for the progressive democratization of elementary schooling to the systematic production of school statistics, begun in the Vargas Era, when the apprehension of failure started to present itself as a political-educational problem in the country. Based on this framework, the formation of a tradition characterized by the coexistence between the focus on poor school performance of students and the criticism of high failure rates, repudiated for causing selectivity and exclusion, is examined . Right away,

public action. Reflecting on the way in which homicides committed by police officers were classified in Brazil, the authors problematize this interface between statistics and public action, normally taken as selfevident. To this end, they compare data from the area of public health and the criminal justice system, whose epistemic bases (medicalepidemiological and legal-police) guide different taxonomies, neither completely distinct nor absolutely compatible; highlight the disputes over nomenclatures and classifications regarding homicides committed by police officers as part of the political tensions that shape the conflictive field of the topic; and point out difficulties in constructing equivalences in the regional, national and international spaces. In the end, the authors argue, the classifications of homicides committed by police end up delimiting the field of meanings that the public debate takes, on the one hand, on the issue of homicides in general, in which the homicides carried out by police officers, as well as the perverse inversion processes that make victims of State violence become suspects or culprits.

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The works reviewed above and the variety of objects and themes covered by this dossier demonstrate the potential of quantification studies to renew theoretical debates and empirical questions that cross different thematic sociologies, with an emphasis on violence and public security, ethnic-racial relations, in education and social movements. Without any

pretension to exhaustiveness, we seek to outline the emerging field of the sociology of quantification, in order to present its main references, map its emergence and still incipient development in the country, and relate some concrete problems in contemporary Brazil that become enriched by this analytical perspective . Possibly, some names and works were left out of our review, reflecting the dispersed nature of the field among us, which is why the image of a trail of intellectual production seems more pertinent to us than that of a map. At the same time, the dossier reflects and addresses the growing presence of quantification in Brazilian postgraduate studies, manifested in the volume of works that have been presented at SBS congresses and ANPOCS meetings.

In an unusual way, the singularly difficult moment that the country is going through also points in the same direction. The Covid-19 pandemic that is ravaging the world, reserving an even worse fate for Brazil, highlights the role of ways of quantifying in the management and experience of the crisis as a collective experience. Predictive models aiming at “flattening the curve” (Motta, 2020), case and death figures staggering decisions

New research and young researchers promise to reinforce the vocation of quantification as a vibrant conversation that crosses different fields, expanding your toolbox for understanding reality.

the construction of the Basic Education Development Index and its

articulation with the neoliberal policy of maximizing efficiency are discussed , which shifts the notion of quality as “equity” to the proposition of quality as “excellence”. The author concludes that the long tradition of evaluating the quality of teaching by measuring what students know is maintained at IDEB, which thus amplifies, rather than corrects, the distortions of a selective and discriminatory school culture.

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about lockdown, reopening and isolation, bed occupancy rates in ICUs, the round numbers punctuating collective mourning are all milestones in the construction of temporality and the stretching of a present caught between the radical split with the non-anomalous past and the sky imaginary of a future without crisis. More than ever, the mobilizing power of numbers as a common referent and their feedback on social actors stands out.

This picture reveals that public numbers assume a leading role not only in the structuring dimensions of social life, but also in the most essential disputes over the political agenda. We end with a thank you to the authors and to the authors who agreed to participate in this project. We would also like to thank Jalcione Almeida, editor-in-chief of Sociologies, for accepting our proposal to encourage sociological debate in a promising and relevant field, but still lacking in investigations and spaces for reflection in Brazil. We would like to thank Victor Alves Mourão, Eugênia Motta and Antônio Paulino for their interlocutions at different times and their support for initiatives that helped make this dossier possible. To the anonymous referees who evaluated the articles, we leave our recognition. And we invite you to read it, hoping that it inspires disciplinary dialogues.

Likewise, the initial emptying and virtual cancellation of the 2020 census risks plunging the country into obscurantism and ignorance of the most basic aspects of any population policy. At the same time, the cuts and dismantling of the census point to the centrality of statistics in the construction of different forms of inequality – regional, economic, racial, sexual and gender –, highlighting a fundamental front of the social struggle. On the one hand, the claim of what should and matters to be told, made by social movements; on the other, the destruction of the measure of inequality as a strategy for undermining truth and denying reality, shared by the new global right.

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Sociologias, Porto Alegre, year 23, n. 56, Jan-Apr 2021, p. 20-40.

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo is an Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Program in Political Sociology at Candido Mendes University. ÿ [email protected]

Renato Sérgio de Lima is Professor at the Department of Public Management at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo, Director-President of the Brazilian Public Security Forum. ÿ [email protected]

Daniel Veloso Hirata is an Adjunct Professor in the Postgraduate Program in Sociology at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and researcher 2 at CNPq. ÿ [email protected]

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