Alain Desrosières and the Parisian Flock: social studies of quantification in France since the 1970s

Alain Desrosières has played a central role in the French intellectual scene from the 1980s to today for his theories of quantification. In this article, I trace his career and that of his contemporary Parisian scene in three steps: first, the period when he was associated to Pierre Bourdieu; second, the one when he became part of what we propose to call a flock of scholars all working on the qualification of reality; and finally, the one when Desrosières was associated with the Centre Koyré d’histoire des sciences. Finally, we use statistics to analyze the extent of the international reception of his work

Rigorous Asymptotic Study of the Screened Electrostatic Potential in a Thin Dielectric Slab

The screened Coulomb potential plays a crucial role in the binding energies of excitons in a thin dielectric slab. The asymptotic behavior of this potential is studied when the thickness of the slab is very small as compared to the exciton Bohr radius. A regularized expression is given and the exact effective 2D potential is derived. These expressions may be useful for the computation of the exciton binding energy in 2D or quasi‐2D materials

The sociology of quantification - perspectives on an emerging field in the social sciences

The introductory article to this HSR Special Issue presents the emerging field of sociology of quantification, which can be regarded as a transdisciplinary approach to the analysis of processes of quantification. Processes of categorization and classification are included because they can result in processes of generating figures and numbers also. The contribution sketches the science-historical development of this field. It is argued that processes of quantification are related in many ways with other social and socio-economic processes. Therefore, one can speak of a comprehensive political economy of statistics, quantification and categorization. Especially the works of the French statistician and sociologist Alain Desrosières are an innovative and far-reaching groundwork for the analysis of statistics, quantification and categorization. Also, Desrosières has pointed to the fundamental role of conventions for processes of quantification (as for processes of categorization) and he has published important contributions to the French science movement of economics of convention (économie des conventions). At the end of the article, a set of positions for a sociology of quantification are presented