A Frozen Landscape? Change and Continuity in the Italian Social Protection System

Chiara Agostini
Post-doc Fellow, Sapienza-University of Rome
Thursday, September 10, 2009
12:00 - 2:00pm
119 Moses Hall (Harris Room)

The Italian welfare model has generally been considered as a clientelistic, particularistic, and familistic one, but since the 1990's different reforms have been suggested to redefine it. This favored the opening of windows of opportunities for the growth and consolidation of those welfare sectors that had previously been always neglected, such as social assistance. At the end of the decade, Law 328/2000, established new values and objectives for this sector, as well as fixed new instruments to plan, implement, and manage the services at the local level.

Analyzing the processes of institutional innovation concerning the social assistance policy could help to capture changes in the whole Italian protection system as a whole. First of all, the development of this sector is closely linked to the changing of the role of the family in the production of care services and the assumption of new functions assumed by public institutions. The Italian welfare state is distancing itself from the a Bismarckian system that was mostly focused on the protection of the male breadwinner as a provider and protector of his family. Since the 2000 reform, the system has instead been founded on a universalistic principle of access, which also marks a breaking with the welfare model based on labor market position.

However, many local governments have not been able to support these innovations, as the territorial differentiation that historically affects the social assistance sector still remains. The defamilization process and the universalistic principle are spreading in an inconsistent way, and the reform's impact varies from a region to another. The reasons for this can be explained by looking at the institutional arrangements that characterize the different territories and at the relationships among national, regional, and local governments. Even if though the new law encourages a national move away from the Bismarckian model, its effects are not equal throughout the country, -- rather, we find many processes of change, and in some places no change at all. The landscape of Italian welfare remains in part frozen.

"In May 2008 Google has unveiled its entry in the burgeoning personal medicine industry: Google Health. Billed as an easy, hassle-free way to gather and organized one's medical records, Google Health's claimed purpose is to put "you" in charge of "your" health information. It purports to rescue individuals from the inconvenience, and some time oppression, of medical institutions by putting them in control of their data. This talk investigates this and other latest developments in Health 2.0: a growing effort to marry Web 2.0 technology, participatory discourse, and network subjectivity to health care and management. At its core Health 2.0 make a proposition that access to more medical information leads to greater control over one's health and that, combined, control and information rescues individuals from institutional power. In this talk I problematize these assumptions by placing emergence of health information technology in the larger context of network society. Using Health 2.0 movement as a case study, I examine the problematics of individual care in the network. I argue that the promises of Health 2.0 movement obscure the rise of network power: a system that functions through production of freedom, participation, and information. Through engagement in constant affective labor practices participants in Health 2.0 movement are recoded as "dividuals" whose health is intricately tied to that of the network."