Le parole della comunità. Evidenze da una ricerca empirica nella prospettiva del welfare responsabile

Community as a concept has a long tradition in sociology as a term to define a sui generis social space, distinct from that conventionally defined as society. For a long time, the community has been considered, in much of classical sociology, as a residual form of social aggregation destined to disappear with the advent of a process of social change defined as. modernization. Today, the prophecy of a rapid eclipse of communities is disproved, and, on the contrary, an analytical distinction between communities linked to a specific place (local communities) and communities of interest (which also find their own new life on the web, as virtual communities). What remains undoubtedly true is that the word community understood as territorial articulation, but also a community of interests and place of primary and fundamental relations (with a declination like the idea of 'vital worlds' mentioned in phenomenology), is a term widely used in public policies and social policies. Starting from these observations, the following pages will therefore attempt to understand how a sample of local welfare workers understand this notion.