Social policy and public action

The book is an investigation of social policies in Europe today with public action standing at the centre of its analysis. Its aim is twofold: to contribute to the development of a theoretical perspective centring on public action and social policies and, on the basis of this perspective, to analyse the framework of constraints and opportunities within which social policies change in Europe. In the first section, It presents the tools on which the analytical perspective is based and trace the general context by discussing the uncertain present and the obscure future of social Europe. The normative/cognitive matrix of policies, together with Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, occupy most of the theoretical framework, focusing on the relationship between ideas, institutions and agency in social policies. In the second section, the book elaborates its perspective by investigating central tendencies and dynamics in social policy in Europe, referring mainly to territorialization, activation, participation, contractualization and the public-private mix. This is a rather specific selection and does not directly take in many mainstream issues in European social policy, although these are dealt with indirectly. Actually, I concentrate on the processes that most markedly characterize the present picture of public action and social policies. The third section is devoted to the discussion of three specific domains: care, school-to-work transitions, the inclusive city. Taking comparative research and case studies as my basis, the problems and opportunities of public action are the object of reflections in these fields, on which my empirical investigation has been concentrated over the past ten years. In the last section, I bring together the various threads that run through the study, linking them to the thesis of the loss of consistency of the social dimension in the EU and attempt to answer the questions: what are the meaning and places of the social realm in social policies today?