Ted Porter's Trust in Numbers is an ambitious attempt to show hen; qua
ntification in the social sciences was a response to problems of trust
generated by conflicts between social scientists, politicians, manage
rs, owners, and bureaucrats in the U.S., Britain, and France. Porter's
argument is that quantification is one way to attain trust within a p
rofession or in the political sphere. His case studies show that less
organized social scientists were forced by external constituencies to
quantify, while more organized groups were able to assert their expert
ise and use connections to important political and economic elites to
resist quantification. While Porter's book opens new terrain, I propos
e that one way to reinterpret the book is to have a more explicit view
of how the relations between political and economic elites produce di
fferent problems of trust and different forms of control. (C) 1998 Pub
lished by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.