DATA BANKS AND DEPOSITORIESsocial science. Altogether such theoretical orienta-
tion has provided this disciplinary area with a fairly
resilient ballast against ideological nebulosities.
And this can be said safely without underesti-
mating the humongous and repetitive production
of irrelevant trivia in tabular or graphic form
produced over the years by the low-brows of ‘‘ab-
stract empiricism’’. Data, however, are a peculiar
commodity insofar that they have to be produced.
Which means most of the time it is costly, painstak-
ing, and time consuming to produce data. By and
large, data belong to one of two families. Primary
data are collected by the researcher himself. Sec-
ondary data are collected by other agencies, mainly
public and private large-scale organizations, in
which case the researcher can only perform what is
known as secondary analysis, and he obviously has
no control over the collection of this data. In the
latter case it is also useful to further distinguish
between data collected for analytical purposes by
agencies like the various census bureaus, and those
collected for administrative purposes, such as data
on health collected by hospitals, or data on educa-
tion collected by educational institutions, or mor-
tality data collected by governments and other
agencies. These are process-produced data; data cre-
ated as by-products of administrative activities.
There are disciplinary areas that have a high
degree of institutional stability and control over
their data such as physics, but also engineering,
medicine or law. The latter two fields, of course,
provided the original kernel for the development
of universities and studia generalia, in Bologna,
Padova, or Salerno. Other fields are less stable,
usually in the area of the humanities and the social
sciences. But in all cases the organized character of
the type of knowledge provided by academic disci-
plines is predominant.
Organized knowledge is the practical rather than
speculative knowledge accumulated by govern-
ments and their administrative apparatuses, by
corporations, political parties, trade unions, church-
es, and other institutions. Thomas Kuhn has been
the leading figure in analyzing innovation process-
es in the institutions of organized knowledge (Kuhn
1962). These types of secondary data are essential
for social scientists, and in fact, as noticed long ago
by Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Stein Rokkan, among
others (Rokkan 1976), the work of sociologists,
especially in Europe, is largely based on interac-
tions with the institutions in charge of this type of
knowledge.
Le Suicide by Emile Durkheim is an excellent
example of the advantages and drawbacks of sec-
ondary analysis of process-produced data. This
masterpiece of sociological research gave empiri-
cal evidence of the theoretical tenet that a cogent
collective agent can influence individual behavior
even to the extreme gesture of annihilating the
genetic commandment. It could not have been
written without access and a hard sweated one at
that, to secondary data. No individual scientific
actor could collect data on events that are so
numerous, and so highly dispersed in time and
space. On the other hand, relying on data collect-
ed by other agencies means that the researcher
relies on somebody else’s definition of events. One
of the most damaging critiques to Durkheim’s
work is that his sophisticated theoretical definition
of suicides, is nullified by the fact that the cases of
suicides in the data used were defined by officers
or judges according to completely different, and
uncontrollably variable, criteria.The work of historians, too, would probably
not be possible without access to the organized
knowledge embodied in the archives of agencies
of all kind. The early development of economics as
a quantitative discipline was greatly favored by the
availability of organized knowledge collected by
public administrations. The same applies to de-
mography, which could base itself also on data
accumulated by the church, and in general to the
whole field of statistics, which could today be
defined as policy sciences (Cavalli 1972).
The Durkheim syndrome, the need to use data
not collected by scholars, but by public employees,
is a constant problem for social scientists using
information coming from the realm of organiza-
tional knowledge. At the beginning of the nine-
teenth century Melchiorre Gioja expresses the
irritation of a scholar dependent on low-quality
public data. He took issue with ‘‘the many ques-
tions that various inept busybodies called secretar-
ies send from the capital to the province. Ques-
tions that never produced other than the following
three effects:- fear that the Government seeks the ba-
sis for some aggravation, and therefore
opportunistically false answers;