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This book is a tribute to Enzo Mingione and his contribution to the fields of sociology and urban studies on the occasion of his retirement. It touches upon the processes of transformation of cities to the informal economy, from the Fordist crisis to the rediscovery of poverty, from the welfare state and welfare policies to migration and the transformation of work. These themes constitute the analytical building blocks of this book on the transitions that Western capitalist societies are undergoing. The book focuses on social foundations of Western capitalism, explaining how socio-economic and institutional complementarities that characterised postwar capitalism created relatively integrated socio-economic regimes, It has five thematic sections reflecting five areas of capitalism, the search interests of Enzo Mingione. The first discusses the transformations of global capitalism, addressing how capitalism works and how it changes. The second provides insights into the mechanisms of re-embedding, in particular how welfare policies are part of a societal reaction to capitalism's disruptive dynamic. The third addresses some main challenges that citizenship systems established in the post-war period have had to face, from the spread of new employment regimes to new migratory flows. The fourth addresses cities and their transformation and the final section addresses poverty and its spatial dimension as a crucial lens through which to understand the differentiated impact of the processes of change in Western capitalist societies, both in socio-economic and spatial terms.
argued that we need to rethink some of the basic propositions about the post-industrial economy. Among these propositions there is, for instance, the notion that our economies need mostly highly educated workers. There is also the notion that informalisation and downgrading are just a ‘Third World’ import through immigration or an anachronistic remnant of an earlier era. On the contrary, new employment regimes in these services-dominated urban economies create low-wage jobs and do not require particularly high levels of education (Kazepov 2005; Andreotti and Mingione
public discourse from issues of social justice and universalism towards a more neoliberal agenda accompanied by the spread of populism. Citizenship and migration The third section addresses some of the main challenges that citizenship systems established in the post-war period have had to face in the last few decades, from the spread of new employment regimes to new migratory flows. Calling for new participatory practices and new citizenship claims, in particular in southern European countries, is an attempt to re-embed these processes into a wider societal frame. More