Global Health Business: The Production and Performativity of Statistics in Sierra Leone and Germany

Abstract

The global push for health statistics and electronic digital health information systems is about more than tracking health incidence and prevalence. It is also experienced on the ground as means to develop and maintain particular norms of health business, knowledge, and decision- and profit-making that are not innocent. Statistics make possible audit and accountability logics that undergird the management of health at a distance and that are increasingly necessary to the business of health. Health statistics are inextricable from their social milieus, yet as business artifacts they operate as if they are freely formed, objectively originated, and accurate. This article explicates health statistics as cultural forms and shows how they have been produced and performed in two very different countries: Sierra Leone and Germany. In both familiar and surprising ways, this article shows how statistics and their pursuit organize and discipline human behavior, constitute subject positions, and reify existing relations of power. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.