Social Policies and Public Action

by Lavinia Bifulco

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472420886
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/22/2016
Series:	Routledge Advances in Health and Social Policy
Pages:	186
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

‘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

From the Publisher