Riccardo Prandini

Il capitale sociale familiare in prospettiva relazionale: come definirlo, misurarlo e sussidiarlo

Family’s Social Capital: definition, measurement and subsidies (by Riccardo Prandini) - The first purpose of this essay is to explain why in the debate about Social capital, which spread across the social scientific community in the last two decades, the family as a social relationship had no real import. In the first part of the essay, Prandini finds the answer in what he calls the modernist theoretical bias, a set of sociological prejudices (operative in different theories: rational choice, functionalism, system theory, structuration theory, etc.) which considers the family relationship as a sort of organic relict of pre-modern societies, a constraint for social development and an obstacle for the full deployment of less bonding social relations. Prandini criticizes this way of thinking and, in the second part of the essay, tries to suggest a new way for defining, measuring and subsidizing the family social capital. The family’s social capital, now embedded in the relational approach, is defined as a property and a quality of social relationships and not as an attribute of individuals or social structures; it is not a mixture of the two either. It represents that reciprocal orientations of the family’s members which, through processes of social condensation, are able to generate trustworthiness and so to engender cooperative actions ad experiences. This special kind of Social capital must be differentiated in: 1) nuclear social capital, and 2) kinship social capital (the latter including relationships with non-co-resident relatives). Furthermore, the former (nuclear social capital) can be analytically examined, differentiating it in conjugal social capital, parental social capital and brotherly social capital. Only by distinguishing these different kinds of social capital is it possible to study their actual relationships. Studying the interplay between nuclear and kinship social capital also means that the sociologists has to include time in his concepts and analysis. Only in this way is it possible to observe the generations and degenerations, the morphogenesis and morphostasis of family social capital. The third part of the essay is dedicated to the operazionalizations and measurements of social capitals. The Author suggests that each operazionalization depends upon the research design, and that it is not useful to introduce only one way to do it. Moreover, there are good reasons for utilizing a certain kind of definitions and measurement in order to develop quantitative research, and various other good reasons when the sociologist carries out a qualitative research. Nowadays network analysis provides new methodologies and measurement systems that are particularly useful to develop in deep research about social capital. The Author concludes his essay calling for new ways of subsidizing the family social capital. He suggests that the modern social welfare system is currently not skilled enough to sustain the processes that generate social capital, and that it is time to shift to a new kind of welfare, one we may call societal and pluralistic.

Family and Social Capital: European Contributions

The essays presented in this special section of the Review concern the subject of the family as a social relation being able to generate different forms of social capital (SC): primary SC (linking its members), secondary or communitarian SC (linking the members of a local or virtual community) and generalized SC (what is usually called civic culture). The contributions by P. Donati and R. Prandini, E. Widmer, M. Hennig and G. Rossi have been delivered at the Second International Conference of the European Society on Family Relations, which took place in Fribourg (Switzerland) in 2004. As explained by Donati and Prandini in the first essay, the family as social relation is not yet seen by most scholars as a form of social capital for society. It is still seen as a particularistic and closed relation, which transmits inequalities from one generation to another. Such ‘modernist’ ideology is unable to observe the family’s social mediations which prove to be more and more important to understand the living conditions in contemporary advanced societies. These essays describe and analyze, in an innovative and stimulating way, what this family’s mediating ability means, and conceptualize*in different modes*the family as a veritable social subjectivity. In our opinion, these contributions advance a debate that will become central in the next future of the European society. Eric Widmer, using a sociometric approach to family relationships, tests the hypothesis that the way individuals define their family context has a strong impact on the types and amount of social capital available to them. Binding social capital is defined in terms of network closure, i.e. a redundancy of ties within a group. From this perspective, social capital is to be found in groups with a high density of connections, network closure enhancing expectations, claims, obligations and trust among individuals because of the increase of normative control. Bridging social capital is an alternative way of defining family social capital as a function of brokerage opportunities: the weaker connections between subgroups of a network create holes

The morphogenesis of disability policies and the personalisation of social services. A case study from Italy.

ABSTRACT Across Europe, and particularly since the 2008 Financial Crisis, new demands for tailor-made services came from different actors and perspectives: user-led organizations, intellectuals, policy makers, social workers, advocacy organizations, which call for a new way of programming, realizing and evaluating social policies. Personalization became a relevant part of the so called ‘welfare innovation narrative’, which concerns – to name but a few – English personalization agenda, Scottish self-directed support, Finnish education system, Norwegian cash-for-care policies. Even the European Commission is addressing new social services, reshaped through users’ capabilities. The aim of this paper is to critically explain, through a case study focused on the Sardinian disability policy, how social policys morphogenetic cycles influence the governance of personalized disability plans and, consequently, the possibility of their implementation.

Servizi relazionali sussidiari e (meta)riflessività. Il caso del "Giocoamico" di parma

In this paper the author tries to show what it means to organize and deliver new subsidiary relational services. Subsidiarity is not only a political value or a more efficient (economic) way to provide services. Subsidiarity is a new way to organize relational services, i.e. services that work on relationships. From this point of view, the subsidiarity of a given service is an emergent property generated by a special kind of reciprocal orientations between the actors of the service itself. This special reciprocity is based on practices of (meta)reflexivity. The categorical imperative of subsidiarity is: act in such a way as to make possible for everyone to act at his/her best, developing his/her personal skills and competences in order to make others act in theirs. Thus, subsidiarity is an eigenvalue, which emerges from these reciprocal orientations. To act in a subsidiary way is to act reflecting about and across the relationships that make the service possible. It is not simply to act in the best individual way possible, but to act for, with, from and in order to improve the relationship with others. Reflections about our ways of acting, and (meta) reflections about the influence everyone’s actions have upon the actions of others, are here at stake. So, supplying a subsidiary relational service means leaving the modern system based on the values of individual competence-bureaucracy-working skills-aggregation of output, to develop a new system based on the values of relational competence-responsibility-duty-emergence of outcome. In this paper this new vision is illustrated by a case study dedicated to a service named Giocoamico, provided by the Hospital of Parma. The case study is only conceived to be a euristic device, which is useful to develop new scientific observations on the emergent field of subsidiarity relational services.

A corpo a corpo col dolore. Una breve riflessione sul dolore e la società globale

Body to Body with the Pain. A Short Reflexion on Pain and Global Society (By Riccardo Prandini) Apparently, our society is marker by a paradox. On one side, through technical systems we are transforming nature in order to prevent risks, dangers and therefore pain – Artificialization of Nature. Pain, according to our philosophical tradition is something that is unfair and must be avoided. On the other side, many scientifical efforts tries to transform “metanatural” phenomena in natural ones – for instance the “biologization” of cognitions, emotions and of the “social”. On these basis, Prandini develop a set of reflections that concern the opportunity of avoiding the pain if this imply to erase the “human” that is the premise of the pain.