Organizing the Public Realm - Sub-theme (n. 22) of Annual Conference of the European Group on Organisational Studies "The Organizing Society - Annual Conference", Bergen, Norway, July 6- 8, 2006

Sub-theme 22: Organizing the Public Realm Convenors: Vando Borghi - Department of Sociology, University of Bologna, Italy borghi@spbo.unibo.it Daniel Cefai - University of Paris X – Nanterre, France Daniel.Cefai@ehess.fr Ota de Leonardis - University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy ota.deleonardis@unimib.it Call for papers: The public realm - as a sphere of several intersecting processes and agencies – has been characterised in the last decades by many substantial transformations. According to many observers, the public realm can be referred to as (1) the social property (public services; public access to the concrete conditions of social citizenship, such as health, social protection, education, etc.) and as (2) the possibility of having voice in the process of constituting the public good (the idea of public interest requiring collectivised expression; the public as public sphere, according to debates opened by Dewey, Habermas, etc.). We have witnessed significant changes in the structures and processes of defining and enacting the public realm. This takes place in spaces, times and practices of the public in itself, and in the fields of social and labour market policies; business and economic activities; public administration; health services and so on. The role and activity of both private and public organisations and institutions have been deeply reshaped. The change ‘from government to governance’, on the one hand, and the transformations of private organisations on the other are both relevant in the metamorphosis of the public realm. These transformations come from many different sources: The introduction of market-like practices in public institutions; An increasing plurality of actors involved in the organisation of the public realm; New demands for de-standardised and individualised services/goods; A redefinition of citizens in terms of consumers; A growing attention to the environmental and social limits to economic action The relationship between public and private can develop in different directions. There has been a shift of social responsibilities from the collective to the private sphere and also a rising emphasis on corporate social responsibility. These are examples of divergent development trends in the relationship between the private and public spheres. Of course, some of these trends may be taking place on a (political) rhetorical level. Social discourses have to be part of the inquired processes, however, since they are not separable from the organisational phenomena to which they refer. Important organisational and institutional changes can be explored and discussed. Relevant questions that may be addressed are: What does organising the public realm mean today? Which kind of institutional actions, processes, spaces, subjects, forms of co-ordination among actors, etc. can we appropriately classify as public? In which way is the public restructured as a place for organizing a discourse in the interest of the ‘public good’? The convergent / divergent paths in the public-private relationship: How has the relationship between the private and the public sphere been reshaped during the last decades? Do we see different development trends in different contexts? What role does the shift ‘from government to governance’ play in this picture? The social effects of organisational and institutional changes: How do these changes affect social daily life? In which ways are gender relationships affected? The public relevance of private (economic) organizations: How do private firms influence the public realm? Vando Borghi (email: borghi@spbo.unibo.it) is Researcher at the Dept. of Sociology, University of Bologna. He works at the Faculty of Political Sciences, where he teaches “Sociology of Organization” and “Organization and Entrepreneurship”. He is a member of the ‘core group’ of the Active Social Policy European Network (http://...