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IPS169 Markku L.
degree of trust/mistrust in numbers is shaped by our perceptions of the
trustworthiness of institutions responsible for upholding such a culture, as well
as by our everyday encounters with and perceptions concerning individuals
working within those institutions. Likewise, the greater our buy-in regarding
an indicator culture, the more prone we are to trust an individual statistician
or the statistical office he/she represents, and – by implication – the products
of that institution. Indicator culture is deeply institutionalised, for example in
the strong particularised social trust amongst the indictor user and producer
communities.
Past and present indicator work also involves choices and judgements
between trust in state planning and market competition, respectively. While
indicators can be mistrusted for the excessive power they grant to technocratic
control, they are today increasingly blamed for fostering the intrusion of
market and private-sector logics into the public sphere. Ràfols (2019) talks
about the “political economy of quantitative evaluation increasingly shaped
by commercial information infrastructures”, and about an “ongoing
managerial push for standardization via ‘platforms’ run by commercial
oligopolies”.

3. Downsides of trust
In his analysis of STI indicators, Ràfols (2019) implicitly addresses the
potential downsides of trust and virtues of mistrust. He identifies three false
ideological assumptions underpinning STI policy and indicator work. Not only
are STI policy and indicators grounded in the assumption that “STI eventually
lead to positive outcomes” – hence, the more STI knowledge created, the
better, but it is also founded on 1) institutional trust in the benevolence of the
state bureaucracy in supporting STI, and hence in its aim of fostering general
well-being, and 2) social (interpersonal) trust in the “scientists and experts
responsible for developing and applying STI”, as purveyors of “the public good
rather than particular interests” (Ràfols 2019, 9).
Ràfols acknowledges that the rather naïve view about STI for the public
good may have been a reasonable representation in some limited areas in the
past, such as “when indicators were used to challenge the scientific
establishment, particularly in low-trust countries with a tradition of nepotism”.
Yet, such a highly optimistic view has given way to warranted scepticism. If
one takes seriously the argument of Merry (2016) about the neglect of “the
social aspect of indicators… in the face of trust in numbers, cultural
assumptions about the objectivity of numbers, and the value of technical
rationality”, then mistrust of this kind of an indicator culture should be a
healthy and welcome phenomenon, which might help to bring about a
different, more reflexive and deliberative indicator culture.
The downsides of trust are indeed well covered in social science literature.

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