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Coron, Clothilde (2020)New York: WileyABSTRACT“Since the late 20th Century, Human Resources (HR) has had a legal obligation to produce reports for management in most firms. However, these have long been considered restrictive and are seldom used to improve decision-making. More recently, the emergence of analytics, Big Data and algorithms has enabled a reconfiguration of the uses of quantification in HR. Accompanied by empirical examples, this book presents and defines the different tools and uses of quantification in HR. It studies the effect of these tools on decision-making and ? without subscribing to the myth of objective and rational quantification ? presents the contributions and limits of the use of data in HR, and analyzes the potential risks of excessive quantification. It also discusses the appropriation of these tools by the various players in a company and examines their effects on the position of HR.”EXCERPT“The other, more critical trend is part of a sociological approach and takes a more analytical look at the challenges of quantification. Desrosières' work (1993,2008a, 2008b) founded the sociology of quantification, which focuses on quantification practices and shows how they are socially constructed (Diaz-Bone 2016). This analytical framework is based, among other things, on the concept of conventions, which are interpretative frameworks produced and used by actors to assess situations and decide how to act (Diaz-Bone and Thévenot 2010). The economics of conventions focuses on coordination that allows institutions and values to emerge, and shows how this coordination is based on conventions, which make it possible to share a framework for interpreting and valuing objects, acts and persons, and thus acting in situations of uncertainty (Eymard-Duvernay 1989). The originality of Desrosières' work lies in mobilizing this concept of convention to analyze quantification operations, which amounts to studying "quantification conventions" (Desrosières 2008a), namely a set of representations of quantification that will make it possible to coordinate behaviors and representations (Chiapello and Gilbert 2013). Desrosières thus seeks to deconstruct the assumptions that accompany the myths surrounding quantification (the myth of statistics that are ostensibly a transparent and neutral reflection of the world, for example, and that constitute a guarantee of objectivity, rigor and impartiality), in particular by emphasizing the extent to which quantification is based on social constructions, and not on physical or natural quantities. He suggests that statistical indicators should be considered as social conventions rather than measures in the sense of the natural sciences (e.g. air temperature) (Desrosières 2008a). Gould (1997), without claiming to be part of the sociology of quantification, also provides very illuminating illustrations of how quantification can be influenced by social prejudices, making objectivity impossible. In one of his books, Desrosières (2008a) also highlights the extent to which statistics, far from being merely a transparent reflection of the world, create a new way of thinking about it, representing it, measuring it and, ultimately, acting on it. However, his work also focuses on the history of statistics and the dissemination of new methods in the field Thus, Desrosières (1993) highlights the link between the State and statistics The latter, historically confined to population counting, has gradually been enriched by new methods and theories (probabilities with the law of large numbers, then econometrics with regression methods, to cite only two examples), which have partially loosened its ties with the State, and have brought it closer to other sciences, such as biology, physics and sociology, In another book, Desrosières (2008b) highlights the developments in modern statistics after the Second World War (reorganization and unification of official statistics, willingness to act on indicators such as the unemployment rate, etc.). These founding works have since been widely adopted by many authors. Chiapello and Walter (2016), for example, are interested in the dissemination of calculation conventions used in finance. They show that, contrary to a rational ideology that would have the algorithms mobilized in finance be so because they are the most effective and rigorous, this dissemination is sometimes entangled in the power games between different functions or professions in the world of finance. Similarly, Juven (2016) shows that the activity-based pricing policy introduced in French hospitals does not always respond solely to the rational logic of improving hospital performance, but comes from choices and trials and errors that can only be understood by looking at the sociological foundations of the decisions taken. Finally, Espeland and Stevens (1998) focus on the social and sociological processes underlying commensuration "operations, which make it possible to compare different entities (individuals and positions, for example) according to a common metric.” (Introduction)