Pierpaolo Donati

Traditional ethics has imputed the morality of action to the ‘‘acting subject’’ on the basis of a principle of linear causality. But in a complex, uncertain and globalized society it becomes more difficult to answer the question of who is responsible for the harm that market agents bring to bear on distant others in an impersonal and unintentional way. Moral responsibility becomes real only if it makes reference to a ‘‘relational subject’’ constituted by the network of participants...

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.

On the basis of relational sociology a new paradigm personalizzante (?) of social institutions is outlined here: it links the reformulation of AGIL and M.S. Archer’s erergenziale (?) paradigm asserting that the person emerges in the interaction with social institutions that precedes and exceeds. In the actual new globalized context, the comprehension of the relation between the human person and the institutions passes through a change of the classical model of socialisation.

Conoscere la famiglia, sia come sistema delle relazioni esistenti tra i suoi membri sia come soggetto societario avente rilevanza sociale, richiede di comprendere appieno alcune parole chiave su di essa; di più, implica la messa a punto di un vero e proprio lessico. Da quali termini è costituito questo «nuovo lessico familiare»?