RICERCA ITALIANA     

Emerging networks of welfare society among public, private and third sector

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Abstract

Nowadays, the study of the forms the societal partnership can take on is at the centre of a widespread interest due to the growing pluralisation of the social players engaged in personal and inter-subjective welfare actions.
In particular, the contribution of the third sector is currently strategic to the start of a transition toward a welfare society, whose realisation depends on the rising of forms of reciprocal and trustful partnership among public, private, third sector and informal subjects.
Thus, the third sector deserves a notable action space and becomes an unavoidable partner in the service offer network. The subsidiarity model, claiming the promotion of the most suitable active subjects in the provision of pro-social needs, gives recognition not only to the institutional agencies, but also to private, third sector, social private and informal networks.
The entrance of new players in the welfare system generates innovative synergies in the answer of the more and more complex social needs and widens the services recipients' right of choice. As the number of the subjects involved grows, the quality of the interventions needs to be verified, not only in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of effectiveness, that is by measuring its capability of well being production.
Such a plural offer system of services, based on a balanced coordinated approach, can become a useful instrument in order to guarantee the desired outcome as much as >>>

Principal Investigator

Giovanna ROSSI Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore

Research Objectives

In the welfare plural society the social policies cannot be seen as public policies (that is implemented solely by the political-administrative system), but as societal policies realised by a network of public, private and social private subjects, endowed with the same rights and duties.
Within this frame, particularly valuable are those experiences of organisational co-ordination among different subjects, in which a high level of collaboration is achieved between public and non public players in public/private decision making networks.
The possibility of referring to a welfare society is strictly related to the actual existence of virtuous relations' networks among the three main social subjects.
It is very interesting, from a scientific viewpoint, to analyse the first real attempts of experimenting a virtuous partnership between different social subjects, especially while the whole system is moving towards a welfare society model.

The research project's goal is to individuate significant experiences of virtuous networks among the different society actors and to analyse their capability to increase the reciprocal trust, to activate exchanges of reciprocity and to develop under banner of collaboration, so to generate social capital from the networking process.
The research intends to focus on these complex dynamics and choses as strategic research material two experiences emerging from a new social policy based on the principle of >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

Under the theoretical perspective, three issues are crucial to the structure of the welfare system in the post-modern society:
- the necessity of restructuring the process of well being production on the base of a welfare society model, built on the principle of subsidiarity and on the activation of a plurality of public as well as private and social private subjects;
- the necessity to adopt a network paradigm to be able to read the current societal dynamics;
- the opportunity to refer to the concept of social capital, as an emerging effect of the networking among the players of the subsidiary welfare.


The welfare society
The fast and deep changes regarding the welfare structure lead to modify the beliefs about the nature of the societal well being, the involved actors, the social citizenship rights, the concept underlying the social policy performances, the organisation of services and interventions.
In particular, the third sector organisations and families can be strategic players in the realization of personal and social welfare policies, together with the state and the market,within a plural, civic and welfare society.

A long believed interpretation has read the third sector as a product of the welfare systems crisis of the past decades: this analysis poses the failure of the state and of the market in achieving a satisfying well being level as the cause of the third sector breaking into the >>>