This note discusses the transformation of the social indicators movement from an 'academic crusade' to 'routinized reporting by governmental agencies', and the consequent risk of attrition in independent social research and innovative programmes.
Wolfgang Zapf ~ has perceptively summarized recent developments as follows: "The social indicators movement is undergoing a remarkable transformation. What began as essentially an academic crusade is becoming a routinized reporting procedure by governmental agencies." He welcomes government interest in such programmes but points to the danger of social reporting becoming "a one-way flow of information". It is important to look more closely at the implications of this development.
Zapf uses a flow diagram where the international organizations (UN, OECD, etc.) stand at the apex of social reporting, with two-way flows down and across the private and public sectors of the various countries. The examples he chooses -Germany, Austria and Switzerland -seem to bear out an active flow mechanism which seems to exist also in the Scandinavian countries (Stein Ringen's report in Social Indicators Newsletter No.9, 1976). Yet, with a progressive institutionalisation of social reporting this inter-flow between private and public sectors is likely to diminish, and it is doubtful whether even now it is strong outside of Western Europe.
The original 'academic crusade' was carried by social scientists and other reformers who wanted to extend the traditional materialistic-economic view of societal welfare into a broader vision of well-being that also looked at the situation of individuals (distribution) and at the non-material factors of the quality of life. Some of those pioneers tried to hoist the materialists by their own petard through the construction of schemes that had the superficial persuasiveness of economic models, e.g. the national accounts, but such attempts were doomed to founder on the conceptual hollowness of selfbalancing dollar-value systems. So attention turned on the more fruitful