ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the regulatory power of classification and standardization and demonstrates that they are also performative—they bring new worlds into being. It argues that standardization is thus a deeply political practice involving highly consequential normative judgments. The chapter explores the politics of quantification using the establishment and stabilization of the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) as a case study. It shows how the apparently 'technical' debates and decisions that attended the early attempts and the eventual development of ISCED were at once also political. Despite the lack of standardization in the categories of education, the International Statistical Institute adopted a resolution to call for national statistics to be prepared in accordance with a model table. One of the most important and challenging aspects of ISCED was the nomenclature assigned to various levels and categories of education.
