Criticising Social Indicators

Abstract

Social indicators are increasingly influential tools used in global as well as domestic settings for shaping decision-making over a wide range of topics. The information they provide certainly seems an advance on acting on guesswork and their league tables about relative levels of performance often seem broadly convincing. But they are also seen by many as troubling examples of a new technique with ‘knowledge’ and ‘governance’ effects, as a way of exercising power without responsibility. The object of this paper is to examine the kind of criticisms that are made as seen in some recent wide-ranging collections of case studies of social indicators. The topic also seems an appropriate one in a volume dedicated to honoring Ernesto Savona, given his life long effort to create and improve the use of social indicators of crime and the responses to it.

We will have a kind of symbolic and secularized society based on the premise that people voluntarily conform to the decisions of authorized expert knowledge. But while order is being established, responsibility may be vanishing.

(Jacobsson 2000)