Numbers and Organization Studies: Book Review Symposium

Mar Pérezts (), Lynne Andersson and Dirk Lindebaum
Additional contact information
Mar Pérezts: EM - EMLyon Business School
Lynne Andersson: Fox School of Business
Dirk Lindebaum: EESC-GEM Grenoble Ecole de Management

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: 1, 2, 3, 4. . . These are not mere black marks on a white background. It could be a jazz band about to begin playing, the tempo of a military march or the number of students that are missing from class this morning. 4, 3, 2, 1. . . and here we switch to the countdown prior to the launch of a space ship or the explosion of a bomb. So innocent, and yet so meaningful, so diffuse and yet so unquestioned. Indeed, if, ‘in the beginning was the Word', according to the Prologue of the Gospel of John (v.1), ‘today there is mostly the number', or more precisely a boundless ‘ocean of numbers' (Ortoli, 2018, p. 7). The seemingly infinite quantification of virtually every aspect of human and non-human life into some form of statistic, percentage, ratio, metric, fraction or numeric value no longer comes as a surprise to us, now that the world seems to have disappeared into a mere reflection of statistics (Rey, 2016).

Keywords: Numbers; Organization Studies; Datafication; Quantification; Problematization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Organization Studies, 2021, 42 (8), 1351-1356 p. ⟨10.1177/0170840621989214⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03188247

DOI: 10.1177/0170840621989214

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().