The following are snippets that I collected during this long and exhausting period of work and movement around my new house and my new condition of rural inhabitants, and their common theme is the relationship between people and their knowledge, and how this know affect our performance, our social relations and our "move in the environment we inhabit."

First fragment of rebuilding Germany and system managers

There is a passage from Daniel Cohen, who has remained with me and I come back often to mind, the theme is the apparent "miracle" of reconstruction of Germany after the war, Cohen parte de work of Mancur Olson

"[...] His theory argues that nations" new "or" destroyed "are followed by the same collective project: to rebuild the country. There is, therefore, no real difficulty in identifying the mode of cooperative action, collective. How many hospitals and schools need to build? What should be the legal duration of the workday? These are just some of the questions answered without great contrasts [...] In the case of postwar Germany, the company is not to invent, but to rebuild. How to cut hair, heal the sick, educate children ... are part of the culture shared by the Germans. Lacking "only" infrastructure, "the equipaggiatura. In short, the capital. But this is small stuff compared to common knowledge. "

Understanding where to hang the paintings in the house is a task that can take months (or years). But once it was agreed that knowledge is sedimentation rate, following a restructuring or un'imbiancatura will not be difficult to call and hang up the spikes: the work material in this case is very small compared to what we knew about them and to the 'establishment' that we opened.

(now that I think this brings to mind the concept of "track set" of Derrida to invoke the idea that any significant movement takes place from a kind of institution deeper and unmotivated - the famous archi-writing).

In both cases, the real crux, the real issue is the production - and reproduction - of knowledge sharing and its freezing, its crystallization in some sort of "institution". This knowledge operates at various levels and settles as a common heritage of every community: our ability to move in the world depends on it and when to "start over" emerges as the real capital that a group possesses.

This shift of gravity from the material from the physical to the immaterial and cognitive work of course in the world of work today (produce a new molecule of a drug is an compessa and costly, but his play has marginal costs tend to zero ).

Second segment: what the banks are screaming to each other

Are in the bank in Rieti, to settle several issues regarding my mortgage, the new account, the bancomant, online banking, the bank machine and so on. The official is a very competent and experience (see it) and have free access to all the management systems of the bank. There is no queue and we are comfortably seated in his office. Smooth, right? But no, because they face a number of specific questions the official is not able to go forward, has doubts about the system, wrong options.

At this point a voice minuet with the girl in the next room ( "What do I press F3?" "Yes, then select option 2," "I request the code, but it is the customer?", "No, is what appears in the screen before, go back and Write it in the package). And so on for about 10 minutes, shouting requests and advice from one room to another. And eventually we will - of course - at the head.

But the official still has a doubt and at one point he remembers a colleague from Milan with whom he worked and that is the "expert" of the telephone bank. The search at the switchboard and calls, after the affectionate greetings ( "How long", "Everything okay?" Etc.), my colleague gave her a series of claims on-line banking password.

All right then, but we review the facts: how knowledge came into play? At least 6:

- Experience and knowledge of past official
- The computer procedures banking
- Knowledge of fellow room
- The exchange of information among co-workers shouting
- The report of the previous official with the colleague in Milan
- Knowledge of colleague Milan

And probably a sociologist working as it should would have found many others.

Be careful not to misunderstand what happened: These situations are not an exception but the norm of each organization complex enough. I'm not a flaw, caters, but the way in which knowledge that drives the business is organized and distributed channels are not perfectly coded. Only that are so frequent and pervasive that it becomes difficult case.

Of course, this dynamic is not visible by looking only formal organization: the organization has made a formal organization chart, coded by IT procedures and the role of official encoded. Everything else, formally, does not exist. But there indeed. And when I pointed this out to us an official we laughed about it.

And when I think of what needs to serve a project intranet I'll remember this.

Third fragment: the pre-modernity of Sabina

What is probably more difficult to assimilate going to live in a village in the countryside has nothing to do with that - rhetoric - concern of loneliness or of remoteness, and so on, the real problem and real watershed above the town is about how which we get the necessary information to our daily lives. Where to find a testing laboratory? Who can cut the hedges? And the hardware store, blacksmith, wood dealer, the mechanic good, the bus timetable, the better roads, good pizza, a tractor?

Sure, we can go exploring, but we will soon realize that the information is hidden, if not nonexistent. Certainly, the information is there, but they are so to say, "stuck" to the people of the district. Is they who advise us know.

Now, according to Anthony Giddens, one of the characteristics of modernity, one of the factors of typical breakdown of the modern, is the pervasive presence of expert systems that provide access to codified knowledge systems independent of their carriers, the most typical example is the GP, the terminal date for a neutral knowledge consists of an organized system (universities, hospitals, ASL, scientific community) to which the physician attinre. But even a simple bus timetable, available from anyone, is an example of expert system.

Giddens says about it: "Expert systems are mechanisms of breakdown because - in common with the symbolic elements - to flesh out the social relations from the immediacy of the context. Both types of mechanisms require disaggregation, and indeed encourage, the separation of time from space as a condition of the distance space-time that they promote. "

Understand? We go by general practitioners, regardless of the city, because each point is guaranteed only access to the same knowledge, whereas in premodern condition such access was much more bound to the context (the doctors from countries with whom you develop a personal relationship confidence). In expert systems trust is placed in the most general operating rules that in individuals.

However, the need to return to address people to get the information makes Sabina (and with it all metropolitan areas does not Italian) an area in terms of Giddens, divided by pre-modern dynamics.

This is very interesting because it leads to the need - at which point saline - a greater attachment to the community (or your frame of reference). Paradoxically, in the country is much harder to be "hermits" because the need to know the need to produce the report and the report produces social cohesion.

After Sergio, the tractor, he placed the access road to the house I told him I would have paid at the earliest time to go to the bank. He replied "No problem, now six of us."