The City Hall and the Territorial Social Services: A Total Institution?
The City Hall and the Territorial Social Services: A Total Institution?
Tuesday, 8 July 2025: 00:00
Location: FSE005 (Faculty of Education Sciences (FSE))
Oral Presentation
The City Hall and the Territorial Social Services: a total institution?
The research was carried out as part of the PhD project and involved the exploration of the social dynamics of the City Hall of a Metropolitan city in Southern Italy and of the local social services as a backdrop to interactions with other public bodies and social actors in the area. The professional culture and organisational dynamics within and outside the institution were investigated, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the network dynamics, which affect the service to citizens.
The municipality is a complex organisation, a collective actor (Boudon 1996), made up of actors who make individual choices (Cavalli 2001), whose actions and interventions are aimed at providing services and benefits to the community, which require collaboration and networking.
However, the organisation observed presented certain characteristics and dimensions similar to those of a total institution (Goffman 1961). The drawbacks of this model lie in its low propensity for networking, despite the fact that this appears to be fundamental and necessary for the very mandates of social services. The fieldwork lasted seven months, from July 2022 to January 2023. For data collection, an ethnographic approach was adopted (Cardano and Ortalda 2021): overt participant observation, in-depth ethnographic interviews, and shadowing (techniques accompanied by the examination of the records from the entities under investigation) were conducted.
The main findings that emerged indicate peculiarities of closed, self-referential systems (Luhmann 1984), with their own culture, and are reticent, resistant, and defensive (Tomelleri 2004), which affect the quality of interventions for citizens. The researchers developed a SWOT analysis model, highlighting these characteristics of closure, as well as opportunities for openness, obstacles, and strengths of the municipality and its social services.
The research was carried out as part of the PhD project and involved the exploration of the social dynamics of the City Hall of a Metropolitan city in Southern Italy and of the local social services as a backdrop to interactions with other public bodies and social actors in the area. The professional culture and organisational dynamics within and outside the institution were investigated, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the network dynamics, which affect the service to citizens.
The municipality is a complex organisation, a collective actor (Boudon 1996), made up of actors who make individual choices (Cavalli 2001), whose actions and interventions are aimed at providing services and benefits to the community, which require collaboration and networking.
However, the organisation observed presented certain characteristics and dimensions similar to those of a total institution (Goffman 1961). The drawbacks of this model lie in its low propensity for networking, despite the fact that this appears to be fundamental and necessary for the very mandates of social services. The fieldwork lasted seven months, from July 2022 to January 2023. For data collection, an ethnographic approach was adopted (Cardano and Ortalda 2021): overt participant observation, in-depth ethnographic interviews, and shadowing (techniques accompanied by the examination of the records from the entities under investigation) were conducted.
The main findings that emerged indicate peculiarities of closed, self-referential systems (Luhmann 1984), with their own culture, and are reticent, resistant, and defensive (Tomelleri 2004), which affect the quality of interventions for citizens. The researchers developed a SWOT analysis model, highlighting these characteristics of closure, as well as opportunities for openness, obstacles, and strengths of the municipality and its social services.