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Redden, Guy (2019)London: Sage.EXTRACT“3  Perspectives On Performance Measurement Societies throughout history have used numbers for a fascinating range of ends (Cohen 2005: 12). One of the key stories about their social power posits that they have shaped modernity since the eighteenth century through scientific methodologies, government statistics, and their use in market exchange and industrial production (Cohen 2005). Taking such a historical view emphasizes that languages of number change like others, and, in particular, that numerous instances of 'the extension of quantitative thinking' become evident (147).  Yet despite the key roles numbers have played in modernity, Poovey (1998: xi) argues that they constitute the last frontier of representation in that their social significance has hardly been analysed critically compared with other kinds of discourse. Longstanding associations between numbers and objectivity have made them the bedrock of the ostensibly interpretation- and value-free 'modern fact' (xii). Porter (1995: viii) suggests that their rarely questioned authority stems from an association between quantification and the 'successful' scientific study of nature, such that use of quantitative methods generally comes with a halo of objectivity, whatever the particularities of the approaches in question. He proposes that quantification should instead be considered as specific strategies of communication that arise from and help to foster specific forms of community.  Along these lines, Porter and others have showed how enumeration of social issues enabled bureaucracy to emerge, and determined the character of the social facts that became used as norms for governing populations (Desrosières 2002: 147, Hacking 1990). They also demonstrated that statistics are not self­ standing tools used by actors, but instead involve complex forms fashioned in and through the concerns of changing social contexts that they in turn help to shape. According to Desrosières, 'By "statistics" we mean here the body of knowledge consisting of the registration and presentation of quantitative data and the algorithms for its analysis such as series, indicators, econometric models, and many other methods available nowadays in databanks and data­ processing packages' (2010: 43). In this view their production never was a pure science but one forged in a reaction between methods developed in the natural sciences and the exigencies of administration (Desrosières 2002).” 