Pierpaolo Donati

Present globalization processes seem to bring along them new modes and levels of commodification of welfare services and policies. Sociological researches show how and to what extent welfare practices and interventions are more and more treated as market commodities instead of being conceived as provisions sensitive to the social and human dimensions of people’s needs. The Author’s thesis is that such a trend is not only due to the neocapitalist character of globalization, but more properly to the ‘lib-lab configurations’ of welfare regimes. These configurations, as different as they may be, are producing the widespreading commodification of welfare, much more than avoiding it. The theory of reflexive modernization does not grasp the issues at stake. In order to understand how advanced societies can (and as a matter of fact) produce the decommodification of welfare provisions, we need to resort to a relational analysis and evaluation of social policies combined with a more sophisticated theory of social reflexivity. The decommodification of welfare is actually brought about by social practices sustained by what Donati calls ‘reflexive relationality’. We can observe it at work in those social spheres that Donati calls ‘social private’ and third sector organizations, as actors of a new civil society.