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This article argues for gendering affective citizenship and humanitarianism. Both of these 'regimes of care' are understood to work through benevolent affect, to mobilize citizens in the wake of the retrenchment of the welfare state. Ethnography with Italian-origin women volunteers at a Milanese association shows that the affect and motivations of affective citizens can starkly deviate from benevolence and 'do-gooderism'. Analyses of post-Fordist affective citizenship focus on the shift from waged labour and state-mediated forms of social security to precarious labour and privatized responsibilities for welfare, implicitly centring the (male) breadwinner as the subject of these transformations. By contrast, this article seeks to call attention to the continuities in unwaged care. In so doing, it shows how the Fordist legacy of gendered citizenship 'haunts' its post-Fordist affective and humanitarian reconfigurations and highlights the contradictions and contestations that mark ongoing transformations of social citizenship in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue investigates the relationship between aesthetics and morality. How do the good and the beautiful, the bad and the ugly, happen in everyday life? How do these 'orders of worth' interact? Do they reinforce each other? What happens when they contradict one another? Does one order typically trump the other? Five contributions, from Israel, Italy and the Netherlands, scrutinize different sites where both aesthetics – the continuum of evaluations from beautiful to ugly – and morality – evaluations about good and evil, right and wrong – have a strong presence. The contributions zoom in on everyday cultural consumption, where people create, seek out and discuss 'good' food, clothing, films and architecture, and professional situations where people look for 'good' jobs, want to work in 'good' work spaces and aim to be a 'good' worker. Integrating insights from cultural studies, sociology, valuation studies and science and technology studies, this special issue shows, first, how judgments of aesthetic and moral value are central to the fabric of social life – from the smallest level of everyday interactions to the large scale of economic relations and power im/balances. Second, these valuations often clash, blend and blur. This blurring and blending enables the drawing of social boundaries, the consolidation of identities and the shaping of selves. But it also allows for seduction, manipulation and obfuscation of power dynamics. Third, the contributions show that in contemporary post-Fordist, meritocratic consumer societies, beauty and morality are increasingly entangled with economic and political logics, leading to new social struggles and new forms of alienation and exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article explores the role that compassion plays in the building of a post-Fordist laboring public in Italy. By exploring how the state has made compassion productive through new regimes of voluntary labor, this piece shows that compassion operates not as a mitigating force against, but as a vehicle for the production and maintenance of a new exclusionary order precisely because it allows for the emergence of a fantasy of spontaneously available public emotion. Affective labor is a desired form of activity for marginalized members of Italian society because it allows them to approximate the form of social belonging that was centrally institutionalized and cultivated within Fordist societies-that of the capacity to belong to and be publicly recognized by the world through waged work. Fordism thus appears not as an era past, but as an object of desire and mourning that still retains much social force as people attempt to recapture or at least approximate Fordist forms and feelings of stability and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Italy's experience of workers' movements in the 1970s and the singularity of its 'creeping May' has led radical thinkers linked to the left-wing political group Potere Operaio to conceive of this particular part of history as a 'laboratory' for the globalized post-Fordist society of the 1990s. The key concepts of autonomia, comunità, fare società, auto-organizzazione, and esodo have become the ingredients for a politics of counter-narration and of 'ambivalence' (Virno) through the feminist practice of self-narration (Cavarero), while a new 'sense of self' has been constructed through narratives of precarietà that valorize the interactive and ethical aspects of storytelling (Brooks, 1994; Kearney, 2002). By examining Beppe Grillo's blog-book Schiavi moderni (2007), Aldo Nove's 'docudrama' Mi chiamo Roberta, ho 40 anni, guadagno 250 euro al mese...(2006) and Ascanio Celestini's narrativized documentary Parole sante (2007), I will demonstrate that the subjectivity of precariousness in Italy is still linked to a sense of 'community' that is constructed against and outside the system of (post)capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines housing quality as a dimension of urban liveability. In the first part of the paper the act of inhabiting is defined as a complex social practice. In the second part a definition of housing quality is given, made up of five dimensions: physical quality of the dwelling, dwelling size, neighbourhood quality, security of tenure and affordability. In the third part of the paper four indices of housing quality are defined, using data from Eu-Silc. Each index is then analysed with reference to Italy. The analysis shows that housing quality in Italy is generally good, but at the same time some problems are highlighted, mainly within highly urbanized areas. Lower housing quality within the urban areas can be explained by the shift towards post-fordism. The profound social and economic transformations related to this process have given rise to a "new housing question", characterised by the combination of old and new forms of housing deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Papers: Revista de Sociologia is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)