Social Policies and Public Action

The concept of public action is a magnifying lens for shedding light on the plurality of institutional and social actors interacting in policies. Looking at recent European social policies, this book examines social policies as normative and cognitive devices that contribute to organizing social life, and are themselves moulded and redefined by it. The perspective of public action is located so to observe how these devices come into action, the powers and interests they help mobilize and the dynamics they generate. Policies thus appear as a tangle of diverse processes in which the erosion of the ‘social’ coexists with the emergence of innovative forms of social organization. _x005F_x000D_