Why and How Counting Counts: Perspectives on calculative practices for organization studies

How do numbers and calculations relate to organizing? This paper draws on a selection of articles published in Organization Studies to discuss why and how counting counts, navigating the domains of the ordered, evident, and known, as well as those of the disordered, ambiguous, and unknown. In these domains, we identify different perspectives on calculative practices in organization studies: from datafication and the making of categories, to calculative infrastructures and the making of collective things, to the aesthetics of numbers and the making of affects. These perspectives reveal that while numbers reduce, simplify, and clarify, they also offer insights into the complexity, obscurity, and ambiguity of our world through their inherent incompleteness and gaps. Such insights suggest opportunities for organization scholars to employ numbers and calculations as lenses to research phenomena both in the domain of cognition and senses, as well as in that of the mysterious and unsensed. This shift highlights a renewed interest in a phenomenology of quantification, inviting organization scholars to engage with calculations—embracing their ambiguity, limitations, and even magical qualities—as cues to explore what eludes the senses.