The Culture of Assessment and the Ethics of the Market

The culture of assessment implies that merit is a variable dependent on the elaboration of thought, and not simply the result of a computation. The culture of assessment goes beyond the several typologies of the evaluation activity (procedural, temporal, and of planning) and concerning the purposes of the society. When dealing with the issue of merit, which cannot be defined in a functionalist way, one of the most serious mistakes is thinking of the culture of assessment as a culture of marks, of certification or formal accreditation. The acknowledgement of merit concerns overall the "thinking nature " of highly-civilized societies, it cannot be reduced to their "evolutionistic nature ", because even when it implies a selection, merit has to be "acknowledged " and assessed according to parameters which are the result of an intense civilian life. In order to be part of an educated society, an assessment of the nature of the linkages that bind us, as well as of the nature of the institutions to which we belong, has to be carried out. It means modelling the assessment of economic activities, of organizations, of technological innovation on the systematic assessment of the family, of public administration, of school, of the relationships between the genders, of the state of the environment.