Da strutture a processi: servizi, spazi e territori del welfare locale

In line with what can be observed at a European level, the re-ordering of social assistance recently approved in Italy establishes directives for change centring on three main criteria: integration, activation, localization. Taken as a whole, these criteria point to the affirmation of an emphasis on the social policies processes, in particular of the processes of integration between sectors and actors and the processes of empowerment of recipients. This paper presents the results of a research on social services for children and the elderly in two Italian metropolitan areas, Milan and Naples, in order to analyse how these directives take concrete shapes in the organizational practices. More precisely, we observe the organizational space of the social services and its potential as generative factor. Indeed, as other symbolic components of organizational life, space is a medium of sense-making processes: it influences relationships, it conveys and creates meanings and it enacts action contexts. Firstly, we refer to the organizational theory in order to focus on the potential of organizational space to act as a generative factor. Then, taking as our basis the research carried out, we analyse how some spatial variables affect organizational practices, in order to understand if and how the relevance of processes takes place, or fails, in particular concerning the practices of territorial integration and the empowerment of recipients.