Building Legitimacy for International Labour Market Statistics. A Comparison of Eurostat, Eurofound and the ILO

Is non-standard employment growing? How many people work in new forms of employment? Labour market statistics are at the core of many public policy decision and, as Miller (2005) puts it, “the linguistic tie between state and statistics” (p.404) is a significant example of the depth of the relation between the administrative state and the statistical representation of its people. Recently, the growing demand for international comparisons shed light on the processes of harmonization of national statistics by international institutions such as Eurostat and the development of new international standards by institutions such as the ILO. But how does a constructed statistical object gain authority to be able to be used as a resource in policy and research? Or, more generally, as Bijker & al. put it for scientific expertise: “how can scientific advice still have some authority while developments in political culture have eroded the stature of so many classic institutions and indeed science and technology studies (STS) research has demonstrated the constructed nature of scientific knowledge?” (2009, p.137). Bijker and his colleagues argue that scientific expertise requires a clear distinction between the backstage and the frontstage of scientific production (Bijker & al, 2009). The backstage of statistical expertise is where methodological and conceptual decisions are taken and debates arise between experts. It is where we can observe the conventions in the making (Diaz-Bone, 2016; Salais, 2012). In the frontstage, the legitimacy is built through making invisible the ‘constructedness’ of the statistics but also through different steps of boundary work separating political work and scientific work (Gieryn, 1983; Jasanoff, 1989), field-related expertise and statistical expertise. Through the collection of interviews and documents that depicts the processes of building expertise and the criteria used by institutions to assess their quality (Desrosières, 2000) and an analytical framework using inputs from the sociology of quantification (Desrosières, 2011; Diaz-Bone & Didier, 2016; Espeland & Stevens, 2008) and the science and technology studies (Gieryn, 1983; Jasanoff, 1989), our paper will focus on analysing and comparing the processes of constructing and debating statistical conventions and building legitimacy through different operations of boundary work in international institutions providing labour market statistics and standards: Eurostat, Eurofound and the ILO.