The social production of statistics: analysing the tacit skills of survey workers in India’s customised surveying industry

Ethnographic accounts of statistical production have emphasised the considerable work of translation carried out by technocratic elites that is integral to processes of social measurement. This theoretical approach does not account for how statistics are produced through large-scale surveys, requiring complex forms of socio-cultural management to integrate the labour of various actors. This includes the skilled labour of survey workers who must collect the required data from respondents. Through an ethnography of their professional routines, this paper analyses the tacit skills mobilised by these workers during quantitative data collection and their centrality to the production of statistics. Further, this labour is analysed in the context of a growing industry for customised surveys in India, wherein development actors engage private survey firms to manage such projects. The paper thus seeks to go beyond the prevailing paradigm of quantification as a technocratic intellectual process and unpack the social foundations of statistical knowledge.