Riccardo Guidi

Youth Policies in Europe: big changes after the big crisis? An explorative analysis

The paper deals with current innovation trajectories in European youth policies. It is aimed at exploring European Union policy addresses on youth condition and the youth policies of four EU Member Countries (Germany, Denmark, United Kingdom, Italy) belonging to different welfare and youth transition regimes. Although the analysis is explorative and the results must be considered preliminary only, a minimalist and workfare-based policy approach seems to characterize European youth policies in times of crisis. This confirms that social changes are not enough per se to generate policy interventionism. The European relative political inertia against the hard effects of post-2008 crisis risks to further strengthen inequalities among social groups, age groups and countries.

Effetti corrosivi? Problematizzare l’impatto del New Public Management e della governance sui social workers del settore pubblico

L’articolo sviluppa considerazioni di carattere metodologico e sostanziale sull’impatto che le riforme ispirate al New Public Management e alla governance hanno avuto sul lavoro sociale. Nella prima parte dell’articolo sono sinteticamente esposti i caratteri fondamentali dei due paradigmi di riforma. La seconda parte si focalizza sull’approccio di studio all’innovazione nel campo della Pubblica Amministrazione. La terza parte espone alcune evidenze empiriche della letteratura internazionale sui cambiamenti del lavoro sociale. Sull’Italia viene proposta una rilettura dei dati di due ricerche nazionali svolte a cavallo del ciclo di riforme del welfare degli anni 2000. L’articolo giunge alla conclusione che lo studio dell’impatto delle riforme sul lavoro sociale richiede di considerare una pluralita di variabili di traduzione delle riforme (pathdependent e actor-dependent). Siul piano teorico cio sollecita a verificare la possibilita di un incontro tra il neo-istituzionalismo sociologico e l’Actor-Network Theory.

Differently Collective. Youth Activism in Italian University Associations

This paper deals with the “ordinary life” of non-institutional university participation and more specifically addresses Italian university student organizations, a neglected entity in youth participation research. We set this case study in a wider research agenda that critically reviews the use of concepts of “second modernity” to interpret contemporary youth participation and focuses on the situated emerging collective forms of youth participation in times of a complicated transition to adulthood. University stu-dent organizations are empirically studied through a longitudinal panel qualitative analysis (1st round: 2013; 2nd round: 2016) based upon a non-probabilistic sample of organizations and activists in the cities of Pisa and Florence. Both qualitative comparative analysis and qualitative content analysis are conduct-ed. Our situated and exploratory study suggests that the term ‘reflexive’ cannot be opposed to the term ‘collec-tive’ when we focus on (youth) participation. The differently collective participatory style of the in-terviewed youngsters becomes particularly original when the associative strategy includes an emerging economic and professionalizing activity