One-way Europe? Institutional guidelines, emerging regimes of justification and paradoxical turns in European welfare capitalism

The paper inquires some of the most relevant current transformations of the European welfare capitalism, focussing on specific devices of governmentality and on their social meaning as mechanisms of sensemaking In particular, two pillars of the new spirit of (welfare) capitalism are addressed: employability; activation. These two institutional guidelines will be discussed as far as they contribute to enact a regime of justification and coordination of social action and to frame a new idea of the social. The features of this latter will be deepened with particular concern to their consequences on two constitutive elements of the European societal self-representation and to the paradoxes characterising their current developments: individualisation (as social ideal and project) and publicness (as fundamental characteristic of the institutional programme). Employability and activation, in fact, can be institutionally pursued according different perspectives, emphasising the private and self-responsibly nature of that objectives or, at the contrary, concretely underlining that they are resulting from collective processes of situated interaction among different social actors. Arguments will be advanced in order to show that this new regime of justification does not have necessarily a univocal one-way fate of development and both ties and opportunities are reconfigured; but possible counter-factual interpretations of that institutional devices and alternative practices largely depend on the further development of (promising but yet minority) theoretical convergence towards the project of (qualitatively) changing the informational basis of policies, through a pragmatist and institutionalist interpretation of the capability approach.