“Who Are We and How Many?” Constructing Categories of Persons in International Statistics

Abstract

Based on the assumption that categories of persons are not only made visible in international statistics but are also (co)produced, reproduced, and objectified by these statistics, the paper investigates the practices of their statistical construction. To this end, we reconstruct the production of numbers using selected examples such as “age”, “gender”, “ethnicity”, and “disability”. Our results rely on document analyses of international organizations’ political decisions, technical instructions, and manuals. With the help of detailed analysis inspired by the sociology of knowledge, the usually invisible steps of this quantification process are made visible. We show, step by step, how personal characteristics are defined, operationalized, and made observable, and, ultimately, how crosses in questionnaires become globally aggregated numbers. Our analysis exposes the tension between attempts to record people’s diversity and the enormous reduction of complexity through numbers. The specific challenges of establishing universally applicable forms of classification also become apparent. The contribution thus combines questions of categorization and quantification research. It provides innovative insights into how categorical differentiations between people are transformed into numbers and presented as social facts.