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
Social Policies and Public Action
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?
Lavinia Bifulco is Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy.
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First published 2017
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2017 Lavinia Bifulco
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bifulco, Lavinia, author.
Title: Social policies and public action / Lavinia Bifulco.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge advances in health and social policy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022079 | ISBN 9781472420886 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315609577 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social policy. | Public welfare. | Charities. | Europe--Social policy.
Classification: LCC HN18.3 .B54 2017 | DDC 306--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022079
ISBN: 978-1-4724-2088-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-60957-7 (ebk)
To Danilo
Never, since it first came into being, has social Europe so keenly experienced the iron grip of increasing social problems. According to Eurostat, in 2014 almost 122 million people about 24 per cent of the EU-28 population were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, 8 million more compared to 2009 (EU-27). Those most affected are women, children, people living in single-parent households, young people, the less-educated and migrants.
This book starts out from the conviction that we need adequate conceptual and interpretative keys for dealing with the present context of the crisis. The fact is that the crisis takes shape not only in the form of a dramatic increase in social problems, but also as a need for reflection on the categories, values and schemes of significance that have constituted the basis of European systems of social protection. In other words, we have to bring into focus the normative and cognitive dimensions of social policies, and gain an understanding of the cracks, the fault lines and the evolutionary directions in them.
Public action is the key tool I use to gain access to these dimensions. The main question I ask myself can be summed up as follows: What is the social in social policies today?
The concept of public action focuses on the intersections between the sphere of government and that of society or, as Lascoumes and Le Gals (2007) argue, on the way political regulation and social regulation interact. It refers to a process-based research perspective, bringing together a number of approaches such as, for example, the policy network and the advocacy coalition approach. In reality there is broad agreement amongst researchers on the fact that policy-making does not coincide with rational decision-making and formal rules but is interwoven with negotiation, dynamics of framing and reframing, conflict and agreement building, so that adaptations and changes are all part of it, in the same way as incoherence and unpredictability.
