商品簡介
The concept of public action implies differences when compared with the notion of public policy. Instead of concentrating on actions performed by the State, it denotes a plurality of institutional and social actors interacting at different levels of the policy process. In this way, public action is linked to the concept of governance and discussion of public action involves the conception of policies as processes characterized by a growing interdependency among the various actors, sectors, levels (supranational, central, and local), and decision-making, implementation and assessment phases. The notion of ‘active welfare’ thus establishes two converging axes of change of public action, both of which are process-oriented: the promotion of agency on the part of the recipients, and acknowledgement of the capacity for self-organization on the part of citizens and communities. Policies thus appear as a mass of rather diverse phenomena ranging from decision-making practices on a consensual basis to dynamics of interaction which perpetuate or reinforce differences in power and access to opportunities. This book deals with this diversity by considering three main dimensions: the agency by which actors mobilize, interact, and clash within a policy; the mechanisms by which new scales for power are defined; and the repertoires of ideas that are imprinted in policies and sustain their processes, in terms of the categorization of the issues, dissemination of values and production of rules for action.
作者簡介
Lavinia Bifulco is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy.
