Concepts and issues

Analysing social policies means tackling questions of values and choices regarding justice, as de Leonardis (2002) maintains. Welfare practices and policies incorporate world views, principles, categorization and criteria for judging what is held to be just, opportune and desirable and what is not. Even giving a definition of welfare is an operation with considerable normative implications, which is anything but neutral. This initial chapter, which presents the conceptual and analytical instru-

ments used in the volume, begins with a discussion of the approaches that have brought into focus the cognitive and normative dimension of policies.1

For those who refer to sociological neo-institutionalism, ideas and institutions are overlapping dimensions, even though they do not coincide. It is from this perspective that some coordinates of institutional analyses are referred to later. Focusing on the institutional value of ideas or on the cognitive/normative dimension of institutions means bringing the social and political mix that constitutes social policies to the centre of attention. However, ideas count but so do the tools and mechanisms of coordination by which rights and mutual obligations are instituted (Streeck and Thelen, eds, 2005). Thus, in the following chapters, when referring to institutions I shall privilege the practice of combination and not separation: as well as ideas, I shall take into account the formal arrangements and instruments that regulate and mediate social and public life. This points to the embeddedness of individual agency: the powers and freedoms of actors have to be analysed with reference to social and institutional aspects and not just the individual rationality (Blakeley and Evans, 2009). I shall not, therefore, dwell on interests, taking for granted both their role in the vocabulary of motives and the fact that their very interpretation is filtered through institutional elements and contexts. Instead, I shall discuss agency by taking as my starting point Amartya Sen’s (1992, 1999) capabilities approach, which has gained a leading position in discourse and the public agenda as a perspective for re-thinking citizenship and re-designing welfare. The most important point affecting the issues we are about to analyse is that this approach helps tackle the question of what kind of agency is involved in social policies.