Social Solidarity Economy Organizations (SSEOs) Protecting and Integrating Vulnerable Groups: Alliances, Repertoires of Action and Relationship with Politics.

As a number of studies have shown, the structure of relationships between groups and organizations is particular important for the production and reproduction of collective action (Jacobs 1961; Granovetter 1973). Moreover, the way civil-society actors establish coalitions and partnerships among them and with other type of actors tells a lot about how such actors address problems given the lack of power of vulnerable groups (Backman and Smith 2000). This paper combines network analysis and social movement theories to discuss the consequences of the 2007-8 economic and refugee crisis on groups and organizations pertaining to the so-called Social Solidarity Economy Sector. It focuses in particular on their system of relations, on their repertoire of actions and on the relationship with institutional actors. The empirical study tackles the case of Italy, in particular, the city of Bergamo (a medium-sized town located in the Northern Italy). Italy is a crucial case as it has a long history of grassroots economic organizing being home of a well-established cooperative sector. Italian co-ops have been often described as small sized organizations which tend to be locally rooted and to focus on specific areas of intervention. Emphasizing their territorial embeddedness, several authors have underlined the importance of this kind of actors in fighting against social exclusion, generally considering co-ops more able to respond to local people’s needs and demands than other types of actors (Borzaga and Santuari 2001). In Italy, co-ops have also been able to establish a privileged relationship with public authorities – both at the local and at the national level – which have been often their principal clients. However, the 2007-8 economic crisis was particularly hard in Southern European countries and the reduction of job places and public loans had important consequences on the SSEOs sector. We try to examine how different SSEOs have tackled the crisis by looking at processes of SSEOs alliance building and their role in affecting collective actions. Are different types of ties built by SSEOs associated to different capacities by such organizations to face the crisis? We contend that network resources are indeed significant in enabling SSEOs to engage in various types of collective actions. However, depending on the type of ties, within SSEOs or between SSEOs and other organizations and institutions, SSEOs’ engagement in collective actions, and therefore their ability to face the crisis, can vary. In this framework, we explore which ties are more relevant for SSEOs to engage in a higher number and types of collective actions targeting refugees, migrants, and the unemployed native-born specifically. Our analysis draws upon an extensive fieldwork conducted on SSE organizations, in particular, on different types of data sources: interviews with 16 key informants, participant observation, and an organizational survey based on a structured questionnaire distributed between June and November 2019 and collecting the answers of a total of 58 SSEOs.