Modern State and the Production of Social Indicators: History and Contemporary Challenges

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Research in Humanities and Social Sciences

Year: 2021

DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.33422/5th.icrhs.2021.12.001

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Modern State and the Production of Social Indicators: History and Contemporary Challenges

Pietro Gibertini

 

ABSTRACT: 

This article performs a brief historical recapitulation of the birth and emancipation of social indicators, describing how they came to be consolidated as basic and irreducible tools of public management in modernity and how they helped shape the roles attributed to the States in contemporary politics. To achieve this goal, a bibliographic and documentary review is conducted to contextualize the main socioeconomic and political movements that marked the evolution of these tools in the international historical context. In this way, we go through their emergence in the 1960s, emancipation and democratization in the 1970s and posthumous perspectives in the 1980s. This structure allows, in the end, the realization of a critical reflection on the process of institutionalization and use of these tools in the national scenario of contemporary Brazilian politics and the understanding of how the misuse of them by public administrations can end up distancing the achievement of the objectives intrinsic to their creation, thus consolidating as a relevant subject the continuous scientific production in the development of studies that always seek to deepen the subject and the correct use and dissemination of these indicators.

keywords: Social indicators, State, Public policies.