Promoting labor competitive cultures. A task for sociologists?

Promoting labor competitive cultures. A task for sociologists? Polanyi identifies in the training and regulations of labor market one of the main causes of the crisis of mature capitalism (Polanyi 1944). According to the Hungarian sociologist the labor markets are conditioned by specific social morphologies formed by economic actors such as enterprises and trade unions but also by families and public policies locally spread. More recently, the European legislator has provided fundamental instructions for the promotion of competitive labor cultures. The flexibility and market orientation of the labor offer are among them. In giving these instructions the Community legislator ignores the collective legitimations that in the various States feed the effectiveness of the different policies. How to combine the inclinations to the flexibility and the market oriented specializations with the different national and regional labor cultures ? And which function plays the sociological research in a similar process? Starting from the analysis of a specific policy as the benefits for unemployment in Italy and France and adopting the sociology of public action the paper offers a comparative analysis of the ways through which unemployment benefits promote in the different national contexts competitive labor cultures. The analysis will focus on the social mechanism of imitation that the policy is able to activate considering the lever age function exerted by related policies and the consequences of this policy on the career and professional growth of individuals. Could the understanding of the social legitimacy of the policies be the contribution of sociology to the effectiveness of public action?