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18 Enzo Mingione The double movement and the perspectives of contemporary capitalism 1 The perspectives of contemporary capitalism The current financial and economic crisis of industrialised countries, which started in 2008, has made the interpretation of our societies more difficult. We are in an uncertain and dynamic phase, characterised by high rates of growth in some emerging large countries (China, India and Brazil, up to 2015), high levels of economic interdependence and competition on a global scale, strong de-standardisation trends, increasing social
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.
grew organisationally as an international network of researchers, principally through the foundation of ISA Research Committee 21 on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development (RC21) in the early 1970s and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) a few years later. In this chapter I also consider some of the limitations of what was achieved, how NUS was a child of times that were even then in transformation, and how Enzo Mingione’s work was notable for posing some lastingly relevant research issues and questions. Finally, I take a brief
the broad patterns of ethnically and class-defined spatial concentrations of poverty. In doing this we have used the historical timescale described by Enzo Mingione in Fragmented Societies (1991) and revised in his subsequent works. This will be followed by a description of different combinations of social polarisation and residential isolation in different urban contexts and of how they could affect social cohesion. We shall also dwell on the case of Naples, Urban poverty and social cohesion 275 which both condenses aspects of other (south) European cities and
‘universalist particularism’ (Barbier 2013a: 14–15). It is possible to develop the latter attitude through a conscious effort – which has to be made explicitly – to eliminate national bias and modestly aim for an authentic universalist understanding, while remaining fully aware of the particularistic determinations inherent in research. Starting from Enzo Mingione’s work, I will illustrate the complex task of social science in dealing with the construction of concepts for comparing social situations cross-nationally and transnationally, in the domain of social policy and
exclusively ‘social’ from reproduction and ask questions instead about how current society is to be understood in terms of Rethinking social reproduction 63 the features necessary for its overall reproduction and, of course, possible transformation. I am suggesting, then, that the current conjuncture demonstrates the proposal that we should employ the term ‘social reproduction’ to refer to the entirety of the kinds of societies in which we live today. To do so I will use Enzo Mingione’s seminal work in Fragmented Societies (1991) (alongside contemporary articles: 1983
process, however, is neither homogeneous nor linear, and is very much influenced by the role the different institutions play, their complementarities and their synergistic effects. Indeed, this mix affects the direction and speed of change; the winners and losers and the overall patterns of inequality that stratify different societies (Milanovic 2016). Following Polanyi, and the use that Enzo Mingione has made of Polanyi’s work in recent decades (1991, 1997 and in this volume), we argue that changes in capitalist societies are characterised by a dynamic double movement
parts of their lives being serviced by ‘Mama’. Household work strategies were important for understanding these changes, but perhaps in a different way to ones originally envisaged by Pahl. Much of this shift was documented by Ray Pahl’s old friend in Milan: Enzo Mingione. In the Soviet Union these transitions were even more extreme. For several decades, the countries dominated by Soviet communism had developed a work–gender–welfare contract which involved the full-time employment of both men and women but supported by extensive childcare facilities, at least
7 Lydia Morris Welfare migration and civic stratification: Britain’s emergent rights regime Over many years I have shared with Enzo Mingione a dual interest in welfare and migration, two fields of enquiry that the intellectual division of labour has traditionally treated separately, in so far as each pursues its own distinctive theoretical and substantive agenda. However, political and economic factors have conspired in Britain (and elsewhere) to bring the substantive and intellectual foci of these two fields much closer together. Indeed, domestic welfare
get rid of class inequality. The spatial determinants of wealth and poverty were analysed by Enzo Mingione in Urban Poverty and the Underclass (1996). The book’s comparative approach reveals various geographical configurations of social exclusion within European and American cities, leading Mingione to conclude: ‘Ghettoization, and even more so the hyperghettoization recorded in some American cities, tends to intensify and speed up […] social exclusion even though the ghetto poor are still everywhere a minority of the poor’ (Mingione 1996: 380). The conditions