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Our book seeks to provide a nuanced and didactic perspective on the use of HR quantification. Therefore, it draws on these two currents to try to reflect as much as possible both the advantages and limitations of quantification. More precisely, we ask ourselves the question of the use that companies can make of HR quantification, but also the evolutions that the rise of quantification can represent for HR and the appropriation of these new devices by the various agents involved. In parallel, this book pays interest to the different theoretical and disciplinary trends that allow us to better understand the challenges of HR quantification.

To do this, this book mobilizes several types of sources and examples. Some of the information used comes from academic work. Another part is based on empirical surveys carried out within companies. These empirical materials are of several kinds: interviews with HR, employees, trade union representatives; participant observation as part of a professional experience as a Big Data HR project manager; company documents on the use of HR quantification; quantitative analyses conducted on personnel data.

Thus, this book aims to provide both theoretical and empirical knowledge on HR quantification. Finally, a few semantic clarifications must be added. The concepts of quantification, statistics and measurement are frequently used throughout this book. Quantification corresponds to a very broad set: all the tools and uses producing figures (or quantified data), and the figures thus produced. It therefore includes the concepts of statistics and measurement. The term “statistics” is employed when referring to the scientific and epistemological dimension of quantification, as Desrosières does, for example. Finally, the term “measurement” will be used when discussing the specific activity of quantifying a phenomenon, an object or a reality.