Away from Politics? Trajectories of Italian Third Sector after the 2008 Crisis

Abstract

In modern democracies, nonprofit organizations and social enterprises have a relevant political role that may be threatened by the entry into the market of services. This risk increases in time of economic crisis, when the competition grows stronger and the economic needs become more urgent. Starting from this assumption, the article analyzes the relationship between the managerial strategies and the political role of the Italian third sector, focusing on the implications of the management models put in place in order to "survive" the 2008 economic crisis. Two ideal-typical strategies will be outlined, labelled respectively "entrepreneurial turn" and "hyper-embeddedness", which seem to have effects both in terms of the manner in which the political role is realized, and in terms of the degree of politicization of the organizations. Since such strategies can both increase or decrease nonprofits' political ambitions, it is not possible to give an interpretation in terms of a tout court distancing from politics. However, it will be argued that a trait common to all the trajectories is the withdrawal from what Mouffe defines "the political", referring specifically to the dimension of conflict and antagonism.

Quite promising yet marginal? A comparative study of social economy in the EU South

“…Stukalo & Simakhova ( 2018 ), for instance, identify four types of SE: liberal, Scandinavian, corporatist, and Mediterranean. For his part, Busso ( 2018 ) categorizes SE entities according to their response to a dilemma they face amidst recessive pressures. Thus, they can either be ‘hyper-embedding’, meaning that they opted for their further institutionalization, or ‘making an entrepreneurial turn’, meaning that they opted for the marketization of their operation.…”

“…Related to the above, our approach adopts a more nuanced perspective where SE is dialectically bound to the dominant socioeconomic circuit, being a pro-market and at the same time a non-market “reconstruction of social caring” (Baines 2004 ). In other words, SE does not undermine market mechanisms but rather extends them (based on Gibson-Graham, 2006 ; Busso, 2018 ). In this sense, we draw upon accounts which have pointed to SE’s role in financialization processes and real-estate speculation (Langley et al, 2020 ).…”