Invited for R&R
“Numbers Relied upon by All Concerned: Competing Constructions of the Audience in Reform of Japanese Official Statistics.”
Focusing on the reform of official statistics in occupied Japan, this paper examines how competing constructions of the audience mediate efforts to transform unreliable official statistics into a reliable means of managing social conflicts. In the reform process, experts from the U.S. Division of Statistical Standards invested in a formalized statistical system to convince the Japanese people to rely on official statistics; Japanese bureaucrats and economists engaging in the reform sought centralized statistical leadership for the same purpose. The American experts’ approach complemented the existing explanation of trust in statistics that has focused on how formalization appeals to the audience as external auditors pressing official statistical operations to conform with their expectations of mechanical objectivity. In contrast, the debate between formalization and centralization reveals that the Japanese reformers questioned the existence of an external auditor; they conceived the whole population as constituting bottom-level participants in a national survey network, who base their assessment of the reliability of official statistics on leadership that defends the autonomy of survey operations against external pressures. The contestable character of the audience gave the Japanese reformers a rationale for investing in centralized leadership rather than a formalized system to convince the audience to rely on official statistics. This paper argues that the audience’s expectations of reliable official statistics were a contestable object requiring the competing mediators’ interpretations to be defined.
Work in Progress
“Governable, but yet to be Calculative: Indicators and Expectation Management in Japanese Economic Planning, 1960-1965.”
“Reading the Government’s (Statistical) Face: National Income Accounting, Subjectivity, and Economic Governance in Postwar Japan.” A revised version of the paper accepted for the 117th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, August 5-9, 2022.