Studying the Social, through Social Policies and Public Action

Review of Lavinia Bifulco, Social Policy and Public Action (New York: Routledge, 2017) - This book has a very ambitious idea of the way a sociological analysis should be conducted and, jumping immediately to one of the conclusions of our review, it results to be a very important book as it is fully up to that ambition. Its ambitious nature lies in an approach that aims at avoiding the trap of assuming the definition of the research object already made by other agencies (policy makers, practitioners, administrations, social workers, etc.), which is often the limit of many sociological approaches to different matters and themes. Too often, in fact, such analyses remain hostage to the already-packed gaze with which different actors of the field analysed determine what is relevant and what is not, what is important and what can be overlooked. At the contrary, Lavinia Bifulco assumes that gaze itself – incorporated in concepts, definitions, technical devices, social and organizational practices –as a precious entry point for addressing what should always be the real object of any sociological analysis, independently from the particular field explored, that is the social. The social, the ways it is defined, produced and organized through the public action and the social policies, in different social spheres and experiences, is the real subject of this book.