Vita e Pensiero

G. PISI, Achille Ardigò and the Sociology of the territory. My contribution focuses on three books: Female emancipation and urbanism, The metropolitan area and The urban spread. My aim is stressing the intellectual path of Achille Ardigò, who shifted from rural Sociology to urban Sociology. Female emancipation is considered in its several elements, and all of them are connected to urbanism; in particular, the movements from rural to urban areas are mentioned. Some elements from the Ecological Chicago School and the Talcott Parsons’ theory are used as tools to deal with urbanization and urban spread trends, which were studied by Ardigò since the middle of the 1960s. Some concepts like Dominance and Planning are considered too; Ardigò used them to face the emergencies of the metropolitan area as a social system: in this case, Parsons' functional prerequisites are used as a «compass» to define such concepts, and to combine theory and empirical research. Key words: female emancipation, Talcott parson’s theories, metropolitan area, dominance, planning.

G. GOBO, The globalization of surveys: its evolution, weaknesses and opportunities It is common to consider that the standardized interview and survey were born together, or at the very least that their union is indissoluble. It is not true. Standardized interview met the survey in the 1920s only, when the last was already mature, with almost a hundred years of experience behind it. So the idea of standardizing the survey came along quite late. It was only in the 1930s that the two were definitively linked, when the survey betrayed its roots to become the methodology that we know today. Survey, survey interview and standardized interview are not synonyms. The survey is a methodology and may be identified with the entire process of research (from design to data analysis); the survey interview is the method by which the survey gathers its data. Finally, the standardized interview, which has become dominant in the last century, is a particular instrument for collecting survey data. Unfortunately, most research practice and survey literature has collapsed these three different terms and concepts into one and the same thing. The central aim of this essay is to maintain the distinction and to affirm that the survey can stand quite well on its own without the standardized interview, just as it did between the 1820s and the 1920s. Indeed, abandoning the standardized interview would breathe new life into the survey, putting it more in tune with the present. Key words: interview, questionnaire, survey, globalization.

P. PARRA SAIANI, The (non) quantification in the study of society. Social indicators between social control and democratic participation The social indicators movement seems to be regaining its appeal. It was an heir to the supporters of quantification in the Social Sciences, as numbers were believed to be objective and scientific per se. Echoing the London Statistical Society’s policy that was declared two decades earlier, the newly created Statistical Society of Paris resolved in 1860 that «statistics is nothing else than the knowledge of the science of facts». It was, their statutes continued, an indispensable science for a liberal state: «It ought to provide the basis upon which society is governed». But the aspiration to know the territory was not always the simple thirst for knowledge: initial attempts were conducted by governments to carry out a policy of control and taxation. Only in the mid-18th century did many initiatives flourish. These concerned the collection of information in a more democratic spirit: information was now considered to be a citizen’s right. The study of society in its various dimensions has stimulated the search for and construction of statistical indicators and indices. The search for a better way of studying the progress of societies has often led to inappropriate uses of indicators and measures. GNP, for example, has been commonly considered to be an indicator of wellbeing. The lack of a conceptual frame for studying well-being is not the only problem, nor even the greatest. Of similar importance are the meagre statistical skills of journalists and policy-makers. All together, these elements facilitate limiting the use of data in public debate. In this paper, I will consider the shift from political arithmetic to modern social reports (par. 1); the success of quantification in the Social Sciences (par. 2); the use of quantification (par. 3); the validity of official statistics (par. 4); the current non-use of quantification and the search for contextual conditions that interfere with the transformation of information into knowledge (par. 5). Key words: social indicators, policy, democracy, quantification, well-being, knowledge.

G. DI FRAIA, Ethics in the market research In advanced societies, market research play a very important role within processes of production of material and symbolic reality. This role makes the ethical issue relevant to every stage of the production of marketing research and involving all stakeholders in the system. At present, the reflection on the subject tends to remain confined within the system and to be undertaken primarily at the level of professional ethics drafted in formal codes of conduct by the industry associations. The development of new technologies is radically changing the detection techniques, making observational processes increasingly invisible and «pervasive». The thesis proposed in this paper is that this process, opening a whole series of new problems, make urgent the activation of a broad debate on the subject able to increase widespread awareness about the role of research market and its ethical implications. Key words: market research; ethics; deontology of market research; innnovative marketing research methods.