The Work Culture of Social Planners in Apulia. A Contentious Balance between Education, Professional Skills and Labour Market

This essay illustrates the role of social planners in the field of professionals of the knowledge economy, drawing from the results of a research carried out in Puglia from 2013 onwards. The social planners are professionals who plan and manage the local policies that are capable of transforming their own territories. They play a complex work that exemplifies the post-Fordist change of advanced societies. This paper demonstrates the difficulty of positioning planning work within the traditional occupational sector and develops a critical look on the empirical evidence that emerged from the research, with special attention to education, training, professional skills and work culture. Planning activities appear suspended between an ethos directed to personal fulfillment and socio-economic conditions that hinder the pursuit of this very goal. The professional skills of social planners seem to express a world view and a cognitive approach that is in harmony with predominantly social science based training but in contradiction with the structural features of the economy and society of southern Italy.