1st Edition

Social Policies and Public Action

By Lavinia Bifulco Copyright 2017
    186 Pages
    by Routledge

    186 Pages
    by Routledge

    The concept of public action is a magnifying lens for shedding light on the plurality of institutional and social actors interacting in policies. Taking into account a changing social world that is redefining the State and its instruments, it is well suited for picking out transformations that have been affecting European social policies for some twenty years or so now: the territorial reorganization of powers; the spread of a public-private mix in the provision of services; the rise of new forms of collaborative governance; the institutionalization of the European agenda on social investment.

    This book examines social policies as normative and cognitive devices that contribute to organizing social life and are themselves moulded and redefined by it. The perspective of public action is located where it is possible to observe how these devices come into action, the powers and interests they help mobilize and the dynamics they generate. Policies thus appear as a tangle of rather diverse processes in which the erosion of the ‘social’ coexists with the emergence of innovative forms of social organization.

    Public action is the key tool that helps to deal with this tangle by posing the following questions. What vocabularies, significances and practices are set in motion by the ‘social’ today? What are the resources that fuel it? What powers are deployed in it?

    Introduction: Social policies and public action: What is the ‘social’?

    Public action

    Dimensions of analysis

    What is the ‘social’ in social policies?

    The structure

    Part I: The framework

    1. Concepts and issues

    The ideas

    The institutions

    Agency and capabilities

    2. What is social in Europe?

     A common heritage

    The European social model

    Facing the crisis 

    Part II: Public action and social policies: Dynamics

    3. The Changing Architecture

    A scenario

    Institutional changes: New public management and governance

    Territorialization

    Problems and opportunities in changing public action

    4. The social investment

    Common but not shared perspectives

    Individualization

    What sort of agency? Problems

    What sort of agency? Opportunities

    Conclusions

    5. Participation

    The context

    A few distinctions

    Dimensions, questions, factors

    Voice and capacity to aspire

    Conclusions

    6. Public-Private

    Contractualization

    Social market

    Public

    Public administration

    Conclusions

    Part III: Public action and social policies: a changing social domain

    7. Young school-to-work transitions

    Problems and solutions

    The informational bases of justice: Merit

    Beyond employability: The Workable research

    Young people’s transitions and capacitations

    Conclusions

    8. Care and choice: The position of the recipients

    Freedom of choice and its instruments

    Instruments in action

    Conclusions

    9. Inclusion and the city

    The agenda of the inclusive city in Europe

    Diversity, participation, social innovation

    Part IV: Conclusions

    10. Back to the ‘social’?

    Individualization

    Between market and the self-organized community

    Depoliticization

    Possibilities of the ‘social’

    References

    Index

    Biography

    Lavinia Bifulco is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy.

    ‘Lavinia Bifulco presents a rich and subtle analysis of the changing fortunes of the social dimensions of Europe. She combines attention to the complex trajectories of social welfare, in their variations across place and time, with a clear grasp of the forces that have been subordinating the social to the economic.’ - John Clarke, The Open University, UK