Plat-Firming Welfare: Examining Digital Transformation in Local Care Services

The pervasiveness of the platform model is spreading rapidly in post-industrial societies. These plat-firms require forms of work, engagement, leadership and integration that cannot be borrowed from previous models. The emergence of platforms initially involved the tourism and transport sectors; more recently, this process has begun to spread into other sectors. In this chapter, we analyse the platformization of welfare services. The chapter presents the results of a research project funded by the Cariplo Foundation that comparatively investigated five case studies of local welfare platform services in Lombardy (Italy). The results show how the transition to the platform model for welfare services clashes with some organisational resistance but also with the specific nature of the care sector, which takes on features that we have defined as ‘quasi-platform’. This term does not indicate the failure to achieve an ideal for profit model but recalls the literature on welfare as ‘quasi-market’ and ‘quasi-union’ and highlights how quasi-platforms go beyond the vertical governance of local welfare systems, redefining at the same time the role of operators and that of users through collaboration logics.