Hybridising Institutional and Ethnographic Approaches to the History of Statistics in Italy.

In this paper, I focus explicitly on quantification processes as processes of institutionalization. Drawing the ultimate consequences from a metaphor that underpins much of the research in the history of accounting and statistics , this makes possible to go beyond the usual considerations on the conventional nature of the resulting quantitative representations. I claim for the need to reflect on the nature of these processes rather than on their outcomes, focusing on the mechanisms at work, on the role of individual agents in shaping their direction, and on their historical, unpredictable nature. The ethnographic study of quantitative practices inside of organizations (ethnostatistics) may be of help for an historical understanding of the constitutive effects that informal assumptions and practical choices exert once blackboxed. On the other hand, a focus on long term final users and on the political reinterpretation of statistical data is possible only where an historical institutional perspective is supplemented to a pure ethnographic approach. Three cases in the history of Italian statistics are presented as paradigmatic of the research outcomes such an approach can yield.