Engaging with the key debates and issues in a continuously evolving field, Lavinia Bifulco and Vando Borghi bring together contributions from leading social scientists to debate the enduring relevance of public sociology in light of ongoing changes in the social world. This incisive Research Handbook explores the critical authors, texts, and research perspectives foundational to the discipline of public sociology. Multidisciplinary in approach, it advances dialogues between diverse scientific and environmental perspectives and considers how best to design and conduct research in different scientific fields. Chapters discuss current teaching and critical thought within the discipline, identify promising analytical approaches through which to research key aspects of social transformation, and investigate the relationship between sociology and its various publics. Rather than reproducing an already-fixed analytical programme, the Research Handbook explores the potential of public sociology to collaborate and hybridise with novel research paths. Pushing the frontiers of public sociology, this insightful Research Handbook will prove an engaging and invaluable resource for social scientists and sociological communities, as well as for students in the social sciences. Its exploration of the applications of public sociology in empirical research and teaching will further benefit professionals working within public organisations.

The concept of public action is a magnifying lens for shedding light on the plurality of institutional and social actors interacting in policies. Taking into account a changing social world that is redefining the State and its instruments, it is well suited for picking out transformations that have been affecting European social policies for some twenty years or so now: the territorial reorganization of powers; the spread of a public-private mix in the provision of services; the rise of new forms of collaborative governance; the institutionalization of the European agenda on social investment. This book examines social policies as normative and cognitive devices that contribute to organizing social life and are themselves moulded and redefined by it. The perspective of public action is located where it is possible to observe how these devices come into action, the powers and interests they help mobilize and the dynamics they generate. Policies thus appear as a tangle of rather diverse processes in which the erosion of the 'social' coexists with the emergence of innovative forms of social organization. Public action is the key tool that helps to deal with this tangle by posing the following questions. What vocabularies, significances and practices are set in motion by the 'social' today? What are the resources that fuel it? What powers are deployed in it?