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The availability of knowledge and information in high-tech sectors with strong economic implications such as the health service, is regarded as absolutely critical for guaranteeing reliable decision-making. Starting from the concrete experience of their work in epidemiological research in various field of care (involving extensive data use), the authors propose (and document with concrete scenarios) a different reading of the problem: data can only be misleading or irrelevant if it is not linked up each time and interested in terms of an explicit project of health as a right.

The article tackles the difficulties of statistical information on labor questions in Italy, starting from the development of a fundamental survey on the subject (Survey of Work Forces) by ISTAT, whose data-gathering and classifying methods were overhauled at the start of the present decade. Despite notable efforts, there are still gaps and delays that make it indispensable, as part of the more general transition from producing and making available information to extending knowledge, to proceed at once to the use of administrative data for statistic purposes, making the administrative sources a primary resource for official statistics. An opportunity is provided by the introduction of obligatory communication (of recruitments and dismissals), which is a valuable source of information on the flow of entries/exits from the job market, and also by the plan to unify monthly communications on insurance contributions (Uniemens).

This contribution deals with the importance of process-produced data in government information systems (particularly at regional level), or of the usefulness of linking synergically the information gaps for social planning with the information gaps for bureaucratic purposes. There are two basic criteria behind this method: information-gathering techniques used for censuses and the choice of the organizational unit of service providers (and not the individual user) as the basic unit of observation. The essay also considers the strategic choice of the unit of service provision and unit of elementary observation in activating reliable information flows and the correct placing and evaluating of information tools and data bases on the individual user for case management. The development of social information systems based on information taken from process-produced data also fills in many of the information gaps, that can also be defined at differentiated territorial levels, including central national level, with an undoubted advantage for the trans-regional comparability of data, as well as for reconstructing otherwise incomparable data on a national scale.

The computerized social profile is an extremely valuable professional tool for evaluating ongoing social policies and planning future ones. It is a means of sharing social knowledge that gives life to a community of practices in which we can identify good forms of intervention, which is a starting-point for re-launching territorial planning of services. In this way the computerized social file expresses and interprets to the full the principle of participation and bottom-up public welfare policies. This essay discusses both its strong and critical points.

An important debate has developed in the last few years on the subject of social participation, centered above all on the study of the forms of participatory democracy and the relations between the main subjects of it. Almost all the studies on participation bring out the role of cognitive resources and the risks of information asymmetries between the various subjects taking part in the planning. The setting up of information social systems in the welfare field too has been the most suitable response for avoiding this risk. However, not all the information systems guarantee the same level of participation, and so theory and the use of ideal types can be used to identify the various possible models and the type of participation preferred for each.

Following the arguments put forward by M. Weber in Wissenschaft als Beruf, this brief paper comments upon the role of the technical progress in shaping social conditions. The paradox of incapacitating processes in the midst of a fully technological social world is formulated as a political and policy problem. The possibility of a cognitive social crisis assuming the political form of populism is delineated. The specific risk of Italy – deprived of any strategy towards the knowledge society – will undermine our ability to formulate and to implement rational (first of all: social) policies.

The legitimacy of policies does not rest only on procedures that are formally correct, but on the quality of the information and real knowledge that support the planning of an intervention and guarantees that it tackles the «problem». But there was a crisis in the authority of expert knowledge in the 1970s. The article examines the reasons for this, the range of solutions suggested by the movement for participatory analysis and evaluation, and the criticisms raised by the results of these practices; in conclusion it identifies an alternative that at the moment has been left open.

Recent work on socio-technical controversies (conflicts) have brought out the emergence of a new model of political decision. In this model decisions are reversible and adopted at the end of an open debate that allows the groups concerned to intervene on the merits of technical options. The article shows the gradual setting up of a model for nuclear waste. It explains how and why the idea of a reversible political decision has been imposed and suggests how it might be transposed to other sectors.

These notes present and discuss the theoretical and research background of the articles included in this Section of the journal. The research carried out on the European activation policies being developed in Amartya Sen’s capability perspective (in the framework of the European project «Capright») provides the analytical field for exploring the knowledge and information bases of these policies, and for highlighting their normative dimension. The conceptual framework of the research on Sen’s «informational basis of judgment in justice» is sketched out, and several crucial questions on the connections between knowledge and democracy are raised and discussed. If and how the «capability for voice» of citizens – and particularly of recipients-citizens - counts in the processes of public knowledge building and enacting, proves to be a focal point to inquiring whether democracy is being nourished or endangered in these processes.

For more than a decade now, so-called «evidence-based policies» (Ebp) have become a leading trend in public action. Drawing on three complex epistemological notions developed by Amartya Sen (i.e. «informational basis of judgment in justice», «description as choice», and «positional objectivity »), the paper argues that Ebp are based on specific and questionable cognitive and normative bases that to a large extent shape what is afterwards labeled as «evidence». Instead of taking for granted their claim to objectivity and efficiency, Ebp ought to be submitted to three sets of questions, namely: what kind of information is labeled as evidence? who makes decisions about this? what information is discarded or left aside in the process of defining evidence? The conclusion insists on the political implications of the reflection developed in the paper, esp. the necessity to move from Ebp to more genuinely democratic policy-making.

The building of informational bases of judgment must be considered as a key issue for research on deliberative democracy. Usually, research on that issue focuses on the optimal rules that could achieve fair intercommunication between participants. But such focus neglects that who chooses the knowledge basis, which has to be taken as relevant, is in a position for predefining the kinds of outcomes of the deliberative process. This is precisely what can be observed in governance mechanisms like the European method of coordination. How to democratically build a knowledge basis, both fair and efficient, to assess capabilities? And how to place capabilities at the core of public policies? Such an undertaking implies the active participation of people to knowledge building, through processes of deliberative inquiry, able to transform their practical experience into general knowledge relevant for fair collective choices. The contribution explores what legitimate claims people can formulate with regards to knowledge building and what rules, possibly, such processes could follow.

Active labor market policies are characterized by a process of selection and construction of the informational basis that is considered relevant for grounding the appropriateness of choices on people’s entitlement, on their employment path and on the job position. In particular, disabled people’s employment paths are based on technical instruments of evaluation of the degree and the kind of disability; these define the recipients’ working identities and «inform» the employment programs by building up the conditions that promote capabilities. Thus, in this article we present a comparison between two governing instruments for disabled people’s employment in Italy. We compare a groundbreaking measure («Care budget») with standard devices. Our aim was to investigate how the different informational bases embedded in these instruments build up different paths toward employment and in which way they affect the disabled people’s participation and the promotion of their capabilities.

A thread running through the analysis of relations between statistics and their social and cognitive context is provided by the history of the different ways of seeing the role of the state in running the economy. This article offers a simplified view of five configurations that can be seen as typical: French-style social engineering is one of its modes, while classical liberalism reduces this intervention to a minimum and welcomes the freeing of market forces. The social state aims to protect workers from the consequences of the extension of mercantile logic to labor. Keynsianism makes the state responsible for the macroeconomic running of a society whose mercantile character is not challenged. Finally, neo-liberalism prefigures a state resting on macro-economic dynamics that it might be possible to direct with incentives, accepting the main hypotheses of the theory of rational anticipations.

The author has published many studies of the ways in which classification of people affects the people classified, and how those people react to being classified, which sometimes leads to changes in the way the classification is understood. Here he provides a general framework in which to examine this phenomenon, and applies it to two examples, first autism, and then, by way of contrast, obesity.

Reform of the health service was one of the most debated subjects in the presidential campaign of 2008, and it now appears as one of the priorities of the newly elected President Obama. The article explains how the American health service is organized, bringing out the logics of how it functions and its main malfunctions. This means that particular attention is given to Obama’s reform proposal in the election campaign and to the first measures adopted by the President when he arrived at the White House.