Vita e Pensiero

In contemporary west society, the individual-person, as Modernity defines the subject lives its laceration between an instrumental function preservation of its own existence, which is designed to produce tradition relational patterns, and the possibility to understand itself as a «strong subject» to this homologation, which has the capacity to point its own action towards acknowledgement request of those identitary relationships, made to safeguard subjects- persons autonomy. Subjectivities, distinguished into instrumental-rational world and communitary-netlike one, are looking for a highlighting, also institutional, as subjects-persons of collective-action and as interlocutors. And in this new scenery, person wellness constrains to a development of reflections, concerning, at a macro level and in relational terms, welfare and health and life quality public interventions systems, while, at a micro level, interpersonal relationships pertain to processes of healing and care. In this work I mean to make a reflection on the transformation of relation idea both into sanitary service dimension and into health one.

Europe building process is a key factor in the future of societies that take part or will take part in it. First of all, Europe building is the attempt to cast politics beyond what Beck and Grande call «methodological nationalism» and, besides, it is a social lab unprecedented in our history. Despite of its relevance, social sciences and the media don’t give to Europe the due attention. This article gives an account of a wider research that analyzed Europe building from the perspective of the relationship between EU insitutions and organized transnational civil society. This dialogue is very worthy for EU institutions themselves because is considered the best way to create a Europe that goes beyond economical integration and that will be able to offer to its citizens identity, sense of belonging and social solidarity.

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.

In most of Western countries, leisure studies have a rather consolidated tradition. Although still considered somehow marginal, this area of study has collected a number of researches and theoretical reflections that are both quantitatively and qualitatively significant. In Italy instead, even if some studies have been conducted, especially in the last thirty years, research appears quite fragmentary. This study intends to focus either on the relevance of leisure time as an object of study for sociologists or on the results leisure studies have attained so far. In particular, looking at the current literature, I shall focus on the different meanings of leisure as well as on the sociological aspects of this important «finite province of meaning». The study ends with a reflection on the characteristics of leisure in contemporary society.