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Hacker-Mullins Student Paper Award, 2008
Martha Poon, University of California-San Diego, Department of Sociology, From New Deal Institutions to Capital Markets: Commercial consumer risk scores and the making of subprime mortgage finance. Accounting Organizations and Society (forthcoming).
Robert K. Merton Book Award, 2008
Libby Schweber: Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830-1885 (Duke University Press, 2006).
Each year since 1991 the ASA Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology awards the Robert K. Merton Professional Award for the best recent book published in science and technology studies. In its deliberations for this year, the award committee—consisting of Jen Croissant, Jason Own-Smith, and myself—considered twenty-four eligible books and selected Libby Schweber’s Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830-1885 as recipient of the Merton Prize for 2008.
Disciplining Statistics is a study of the cultural work that early proponents of vital statistics (in England) and demography (in France) used to introduce an idea that we all now take for granted: that aggregates of individuals exhibit probabilistic regularities as national populations. In tracing efforts to promote this idea and the statistical reasoning required to make sense of it, Schweber offers a detailed and insightful account of the entwining of epistemological and political arguments across the often fluid boundaries of the academy and the state. Are you intrigued? The book goes much deeper, but I won’t, other than to note a few of the book’s many contributions.
Comparative histories of disciplinary processes are few and far between; studies of failed disciplinary efforts are similarly rare, as are studies that consider discipline-building outside the academy. Disciplining Statistics offers all three. Schweber’s use of comparative history broadens the scope of her analysis, not just cross-nationally, but conceptually as well to consider nuanced questions about what disciplines are and where and how they come to be. The answer—and this is the book’s main conceptual contribution—lies in the analysis of ìdisciplinary activity.î This is in some ways a more ambiguous concept than either ìdiscipline formationî or ìdisciplinary practiceî (the standard frames of extant studies) but Schweber uses that ambiguity to her historical advantage. She peers in to the recesses of demography’s past, to conflicts among statisticians, medical professionals, civil administrators, legislators and intellectuals over the place of statistical knowledge in the state and its meaning in civil society—conflicts that occurred decades before distinct social science disciplines emerged out of the universities of the late nineteenth century. Venturing into this disciplinary prehistory has empirical payoff as well, as Schweber provides answers to questions about the origins of demography that historians of the field have missed, their eyes trained perhaps too closely on the century’s brightly lit end, rather than its murky middle.
These accomplishments and more besides set this study above a host of impressive competitors. Please join me in congratulating Libby Schweber on her book and her prize.
Scott Frickel for the Award Committee
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