Quentin Dufour winner of the Alain Desrosières Prize

Quentin Dufour winner of the Alain Desrosières Prize


Quentin Dufour is, alongside Aude Danieli and Pauline Hervois, one of the three winners of the 3rd edition 2020 of the Alain Desrosières Prize awarded by the French Statistical Society. The three laureates will publish an article in a special issue of the journal Statistique et société. The 1st prize was awarded to Pauline Hervois. The Alain Desrosières Prize “aims to distinguish an original work […] which places statistics, or more broadly quantification, at the heart of sociological analysis and sheds light on the political processes of conception, production and dissemination of figures, its actors, its challenges, its effects and its uses, with the hindsight to which Alain Desrosières invited.”

Quentin Dufour was rewarded for the research he carried out as part of his doctoral thesis “The accounting objectification of the National Economy: An inquiry into the French GDP and national accounts production process” defended  in November 2019, which he prepared at the Doctoral School “Sciences of Decision, Organizations, Society and Exchange” (SDOSE) of PSL University, under the supervision of Alexandre Mallard (CSI, Mines ParisTech) and Dominique Méda (IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine). On the basis of a nine-month ethnographic survey within the national accounts department of INSEE (the National institute of statistics and economic studies), he studied the role of quantification work in the production and stabilization of a representation of the French economy, which he approaches from the perspective of the sociology of quantification, the sociology of activity, and Science Studies. He analyses in detail the work of arbitration – or interpretative work during which figures are questioned, evaluated, and sometimes modified – from which the representation of the economy derives its overall coherence, in time and space.

Quentin is now a post-doc at the CSI, where he is currently pursuing his research on the transformation of scientific journal publication models in the era of open access as part of a research project entitled “Socio-Economics of Scientific Publication”.