Social Policies and Public Action

ISBN-13: 9781138347496 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 174 str.

Lavinia Bifulco

Opis

The concept of public action is a magnifying lens for shedding light on the plurality of institutional and social actors interacting in policies. Looking at recent European social policies, 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 so 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 diverse processes in which the erosion of the ‘social’ coexists with the emergence of innovative forms of social organization.

 

Recenzje

‘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

O autorze

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