Wendy Nelson Espeland
Biographic Data
| ID | 203784 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wendy Nelson Espeland |
| GIVEN NAMES | Wendy Nelson |
| FAMILY NAME | Espeland |
| SIGNATURE | ESPELAND W N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2292 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Islands of Qualities in an Ocean of Quantification”: A Conversation with Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder
In this interview, Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder both reflect on their work on rankings, reactivity and commensuration, and think about the implication their sociological work could have on the practices of those dealing with rankings and their reactive effects
Protecting Basic Legal Freedoms: International Legal Complexes, Accountability Devices, and the Deviant Case of China
With a focus on legal and other organizational actors beyond the state, this article seeks to expand the theory of conditions under which legal occupations will mobilize to fight for basic legal freedoms within states. It elaborates the line of scholarship on legal complexes and political liberalism within states since the 17 th century. First, we catalog harms that international organizations (IOs) of many kinds seek to protect in the more than …
Five ways to ensure that models serve society: A manifesto
When Numbers Rule - Alain Supiot, Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance (Oxford/Portland Or, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ethical dimensions of quantification
The ethical dimensions of quantification are seldom analysed. We examine three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification - its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention, and shape opportunity structures. We do so in the context of three recent examples of new types of quantification : university rankings, the racial classification of Asians in the US, and facial recognition algorithms. Our examples highlight the impor…
What's New with Numbers? Sociological Approaches to the Study of Quantification
Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scho…
Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life
The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal educa…
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
Accountability, Quantification, and Law
Accountability can mean many things, but increasingly it is linked to quantification. This is true in many fields, including law. This review considers how the recent emphasis on quantitative accountability has influenced law and legal practices. Rather than offering a broad survey of quantitative techniques deployed in law, the article examines three legal contexts in which quantification has shaped how actors are held accountable: sentencing gu…
Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds
Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured-offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequ…
Money, Meaning, and Morality
This chapter contains sections titled: Money in Exchange: How Flow Affects Meaning Money and Nonexchange: Limits on Liquidity Monetary Media Meaning and Monetarization Conclusion
Framing the Rational in Fieldwork
Bureaucrats and Indians in a Contemporary Colonial Encounter
This article investigates the effects of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in structuring an encounter over a decision about building a dam in central Arizona. From the vantage point of three groups with deep-investments in the outcome of this decision, it analyzes how the interests and identities of these parties were transformed as a result of this encounter. In defining standing and the terms of relevance, in providing a political …
Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy
This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences…
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
Money, Meaning, and Morality
Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money's use and flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activ…
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
Authority by the Numbers: Porter on Quantification, Discretion, and the Legitimation of Expertise
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Authority by the Numbers: Porter on Quantification, Discretion, and the Legitimation of Expertise
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations
Legally Mediated Identity: The National Environmental Policy Act and the Bureaucratic Construction of Interests
In representing the interests of a group, law may simultaneously construct the subject holding those interests. When groups question the implications of an imposed subjectivity, the politics of identity may become a forum for resistance. I examine law's potential to shape identity, based on a controversial decision affecting Yavapai residents of the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona. A proposed dam threatened to move the Yavapai from their anc…
Power, policy and paperwork: The bureaucratic representation of interests
Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality
This article addresses claims made by Weber, Schumpeter, and Sombart concerning the importance of double-entry bookkeeping. They argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production. The history of accounting methods and practices from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments. Two important dimensions of accounting …
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds
Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured-offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequ…
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal educa…
What's New with Numbers? Sociological Approaches to the Study of Quantification
Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scho…
Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality
This article addresses claims made by Weber, Schumpeter, and Sombart concerning the importance of double-entry bookkeeping. They argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production. The history of accounting methods and practices from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments. Two important dimensions of accounting …
Money, Meaning, and Morality
Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money's use and flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activ…
Accountability, Quantification, and Law
Accountability can mean many things, but increasingly it is linked to quantification. This is true in many fields, including law. This review considers how the recent emphasis on quantitative accountability has influenced law and legal practices. Rather than offering a broad survey of quantitative techniques deployed in law, the article examines three legal contexts in which quantification has shaped how actors are held accountable: sentencing gu…
Legally Mediated Identity: The National Environmental Policy Act and the Bureaucratic Construction of Interests
In representing the interests of a group, law may simultaneously construct the subject holding those interests. When groups question the implications of an imposed subjectivity, the politics of identity may become a forum for resistance. I examine law's potential to shape identity, based on a controversial decision affecting Yavapai residents of the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona. A proposed dam threatened to move the Yavapai from their anc…
Power, policy and paperwork: The bureaucratic representation of interests
Ethical dimensions of quantification
The ethical dimensions of quantification are seldom analysed. We examine three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification - its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention, and shape opportunity structures. We do so in the context of three recent examples of new types of quantification : university rankings, the racial classification of Asians in the US, and facial recognition algorithms. Our examples highlight the impor…
Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy
This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences…
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
Bureaucrats and Indians in a Contemporary Colonial Encounter
This article investigates the effects of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in structuring an encounter over a decision about building a dam in central Arizona. From the vantage point of three groups with deep-investments in the outcome of this decision, it analyzes how the interests and identities of these parties were transformed as a result of this encounter. In defining standing and the terms of relevance, in providing a political …
Protecting Basic Legal Freedoms: International Legal Complexes, Accountability Devices, and the Deviant Case of China
With a focus on legal and other organizational actors beyond the state, this article seeks to expand the theory of conditions under which legal occupations will mobilize to fight for basic legal freedoms within states. It elaborates the line of scholarship on legal complexes and political liberalism within states since the 17 th century. First, we catalog harms that international organizations (IOs) of many kinds seek to protect in the more than …
Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life
Accounting for Rationality: Double-Entry Bookkeeping and the Rhetoric of Economic Rationality
This article addresses claims made by Weber, Schumpeter, and Sombart concerning the importance of double-entry bookkeeping. They argue that accounting played a key technical role in enhancing rationality and furthering the development of capitalism methods of production. The history of accounting methods and practices from the Middle Ages to the 19th century is surveyed in order to evaluate these arguments. Two important dimensions of accounting …
Power, policy and paperwork: The bureaucratic representation of interests
The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against Multinational Corporations
Legally Mediated Identity: The National Environmental Policy Act and the Bureaucratic Construction of Interests
In representing the interests of a group, law may simultaneously construct the subject holding those interests. When groups question the implications of an imposed subjectivity, the politics of identity may become a forum for resistance. I examine law's potential to shape identity, based on a controversial decision affecting Yavapai residents of the Fort McDowell Reservation in Arizona. A proposed dam threatened to move the Yavapai from their anc…
Authority by the Numbers: Porter on Quantification, Discretion, and the Legitimation of Expertise
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Authority by the Numbers: Porter on Quantification, Discretion, and the Legitimation of Expertise
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Money, Meaning, and Morality
Modern money creates, transforms, transports, and possesses meaning by virtue of how it is used. This article devises a framework for the systematic study of monetary meaning. In particular, monetary meanings depend on the flow of money (both its proximate source and future direction) and on who promulgates or issues it. Meanings also derive from how money's use and flow are restricted and on monetary media. Monetarization quantifies social activ…
Commensuration as a Social Process
Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and politica…
The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest
Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy
This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences…
Bureaucrats and Indians in a Contemporary Colonial Encounter
This article investigates the effects of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in structuring an encounter over a decision about building a dam in central Arizona. From the vantage point of three groups with deep-investments in the outcome of this decision, it analyzes how the interests and identities of these parties were transformed as a result of this encounter. In defining standing and the terms of relevance, in providing a political …
Money, Meaning, and Morality
This chapter contains sections titled: Money in Exchange: How Flow Affects Meaning Money and Nonexchange: Limits on Liquidity Monetary Media Meaning and Monetarization Conclusion
Framing the Rational in Fieldwork
Accountability, Quantification, and Law
Accountability can mean many things, but increasingly it is linked to quantification. This is true in many fields, including law. This review considers how the recent emphasis on quantitative accountability has influenced law and legal practices. Rather than offering a broad survey of quantitative techniques deployed in law, the article examines three legal contexts in which quantification has shaped how actors are held accountable: sentencing gu…
Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds
Recently, there has been a proliferation of measures responding to demands for accountability and transparency. Using the example of media rankings of law schools, this article argues that the methodological concept of reactivity-the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured-offers a useful lens for disclosing how these measures effect change. A framework is proposed for investigating the consequ…
A Sociology of Quantification
One of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena, yet sociologists generally have paid little attention to the spread of quantification or the significance of new regimes of measurement. Our article addresses this oversight by analyzing quantification - the production and communication of numbers - as a general sociological phenome…
The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change
This article demonstrates the value of Foucault's conception of discipline for understanding organizational responses to rankings. Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures. Foucault's depiction of two important processes, surveillance and normalization, show how rankings change perceptions of legal educa…
Standards and Their Stories: How Quantifying, Classifying, and Formalizing Practices Shape Everyday Life
When Numbers Rule - Alain Supiot, Governance by Numbers: The Making of a Legal Model of Allegiance (Oxford/Portland Or, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Ethical dimensions of quantification
The ethical dimensions of quantification are seldom analysed. We examine three ethical features that are characteristic of quantification - its capacity to express or mediate power, focus attention, and shape opportunity structures. We do so in the context of three recent examples of new types of quantification : university rankings, the racial classification of Asians in the US, and facial recognition algorithms. Our examples highlight the impor…
What's New with Numbers? Sociological Approaches to the Study of Quantification
Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scho…
Five ways to ensure that models serve society: A manifesto
Protecting Basic Legal Freedoms: International Legal Complexes, Accountability Devices, and the Deviant Case of China
With a focus on legal and other organizational actors beyond the state, this article seeks to expand the theory of conditions under which legal occupations will mobilize to fight for basic legal freedoms within states. It elaborates the line of scholarship on legal complexes and political liberalism within states since the 17 th century. First, we catalog harms that international organizations (IOs) of many kinds seek to protect in the more than …
Islands of Qualities in an Ocean of Quantification”: A Conversation with Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder
In this interview, Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder both reflect on their work on rankings, reactivity and commensuration, and think about the implication their sociological work could have on the practices of those dealing with rankings and their reactive effects
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Law and economics (7 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works)