Social Spirals through Everyday Group Life: Settings and Group Styles in a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Everyday group life is generally neglected in the study of the ongoing shifts affecting voluntary associations. This paper is grounded on a comparative ethnography of three Milanese associations affected by transformations in forms of voluntary participation, repertoires of action, and in their relations with public institutions. The study focuses on group styles and settings to ascertain the role played by everyday group life in shaping the implications of these transformations for the production of inclusive outcomes by the observed associations. The author introduces three different results produced by the studied associations and account for them with the same overall argument, which focus on practices and spaces shaping everyday group life. The main findings illustrate that everyday group life works both as a filter through which transformations produce consequences and also as a site of autonomous elaboration through which associations' outcomes are made and unmade.

Learning Democratic Attitudes and Skills: Politics and Volunteer Engagement

“…The role of these experiences seems more important, speci cally for the social classes that are less endowed with cultural and economic resources; in these social classes, participation in associations and volunteering largely compensates for the relative social "peripherality" of the more modest classes. Here an inclusive group's style (Vitale, 2003;Eliasoph, 2016;Citroni, 2018) reduces the effects of exclusion from democratic political participation structured by social inequalities. In 2013, associationism was con rmed as a true school of democracy, namely, for the working classes.…”

“…For qualitative analysis of mechanisms associated to poor, marginal, and deprived individuals political empowering by community-based associations, seeVitale and Boschetti (2011);Citroni (2018),Carrel (2016);and Vitale (2019).12 Learning Democratic Attitudes and Skills: Politics and Volunteer Engagement…”