Rasputin’s black box How statistics are used in Norwegian municipality monitoring and administration 1 Norwegian municipality politics- and administration is experiencing a downscaling from hierarchies towards two-level-models. With up to 250 divisions on the second level, communication of expectations and reports are simplified through statistical tools and expressions. How is this quantification of monitoring affecting the ways of government? The basic assumption is that statistics and methods are historical, social and most of all political constructs, results of conflicts and compromises through the last 200 years. What is quality, how do we monitor it and describe it? Description through numbers - and which way to describe through numbers - are choices of political nature. We believe the consequences of Norwegian municipalities’ use of statistics fall into two parallel categories: Changes of ways of seeing political issues, and increased distance in decision-making. The study takes basis in qualitative data of two administrations, and a broad survey of all Norwegian municipality administrations. The part of the study presented here discusses the tools and methods in use, and through discourse- and rational choice analysis we discover how these technologies both change and manifest ideas, values and ways of government. We use the concepts of standardization, quantification, statistical analysis and formalization to specify the idea of statistics as an analytical object, and find the empirical concepts of monitoring and audit as describing parallel processes through which an audit culture is brought forward in the organizations. Jon Hovland Department of Sociology and Political Science Norwegian University of Technology and Science NTNU N-7491 TRONDHEIM Norway jonh@svt.ntnu.no 1 Introduction Audit cultures has since the last fifteen years made their way into managements and public policies, and through the last ten years also into the writings of social scientists (Power 1997; Strathern 2000a). This paper reports how some of the way into the public administrations arises through a distortion between matters of monitoring, that is internally validated, and audit, that is externally validated. The exact meaning of these two concepts will be thoroughly 1 This paper is a part of the research program “For whom the Bell Curves” (http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iss/projects/bell), financed by the Norwegian research Council, and coordinated by Prof. Ann Rudinow Sætnan at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. I have also had great help from supervisor Svein Hammer, and colleague Nadji Aïssa Khefif. 1