Читать книгу Quantifying Human Resources - Clotilde Coron - Страница 8

In The Measure of Reality, Crosby (1998) describes the turning point in Medieval and Renaissance Europe that led to the supremacy of quantitative over qualitative thinking. Crosby gives several examples illustrating how widespread this phenomenon was in various fields: the invention and diffusion of the mechanical clock, double-entry accounting and perspective painting, for example. Even music could not escape this movement of “metrologization” (Vatin 2013). It became “measured”, rhythmic and obeyed quantified rules. Crosby goes so far as to link the rise of quantification to the supremacy that Europeans enjoyed in the following centuries.

The author reminds us that the transition to measurement and the quantitative method has been part of a very important change in mentality, and that the deeply rooted habits of a society dominated by quantification today make us partly blind to the implications of this upheaval. Crosby gives several reasons for this upheaval. First, he evokes the development of trade and the State, which has manifested itself in two emblematic places, the market square and the university, and then the renewal of science. But above all, it underlines the importance attached to visualization in the Middle Ages. According to him, the transition from oral to written transmission, whether in literature, music or account books, and the appearance of geometry and perspective in painting, accompanied and catalyzed the transition to quantification, which became necessary for these different activities: tempo and pitch measurement to write music, double-entry accounting to write in accounting books and the calculation of perspectives are all ways of introducing quantification in areas that had not previously benefited from it.

Supiot (2015, p. 104, author’s translation) also notes the growing importance of numbers, particularly in the Western world: “It is in the Western world that expectations of them have constantly expanded: initially objects of contemplation, they became a means of knowledge and then of forecasting, before being endowed with a strictly legal force with the contemporary practice of governance by numbers.” Supiot thus insists on the normative use of quantification, particularly in law and in international treaties and conventions, among others. More precisely, he identifies four normative functions conferred on quantification: accountability (an illustration being the account books that link numbers and the law), administration (knowing the resources of a population to be able to act on them), judging (the judge having to weigh up each testimony to determine the probability that the accused is guilty) and legislation (using statistics to decide laws in the field of public health, for example the preventive inoculation of smallpox that could reduce the disease as a whole but be fatal for some people inoculated in the 18th Century).