Industry Analysts and the Labour of Comparison

This chapter considers how incommensurable artefacts and actors are brought together, the relationships between them standardized, so that they can be compared in the same space. This issue — described here as the labour of comparison — is beginning to attract attention from scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS), Economic Sociology, Organization Studies and beyond. Some have gone as far as to conceptualize the economy in a way that comparison is central to its organization (Callon et al., 2002). Within this view, what has been termed as an ‘economy of qualities’ (Callon et al., 2002), the experts that measure and classify the properties of technologies and products are key. When lacking the devices to establish equivalence, how can different objects be brought together and compared? Without the practices to produce differences how can similar commodities be sorted out? The labour of comparison is not without politics or complexities (Barry, 2006; Mol, 2002; Porter, 1995) particularly concerning the status and detachment of experts who perform this work, the devices used in their craft, the identification of the properties to be measured and the calculations and actions that stem from these practices (Callon and Muniesa, 2005). The labour of comparison and its related politics and complexities, should be of wider interest to scholars interested in objects and the economy, technologies and standardization.