Government of the People

I expect lots of you will already know about this website - it’s hardly new. Still, worth pointing it out again I think, just to remind sociology students and teachers that it’s there and its worth using - a valuable source of secondary data. Governments love collecting information. For years, sociology teachers and lecturers would happily plunder this data or else set out an anti-positivist critique of official statistics, telling us that such things couldn’t be entirely trusted. Then along came the Foucauldians and took it all just a bit further. It’s not just that official statistics are selective; they are of course. And yes, they are constructions, but it’s more than that; because in doing that they also construct us and we internalise their standards and criteria, often without realising it. So there is another sense of government - not just ‘the Government’ who rule a society- but in the sense Foucault used the term to refer to the way the most apparently inconsequential of details such as the fact of our individuality - are in fact ‘governed’ by the state. And you can surely see it clearly in the galaxy of statistics gathered on Direct.gov.