“Putting Family First”: a Sociological Analysis of Doherty’s Citizen Professionalism and Participatory Approaches

This article proposes a critical analysis of W. J. Doherty’s lecture on Citizen Professionalism, also published in this review. Citizen Professionalism is described as a participative or community approach, whose specific features include the strategic role assigned to families in the solution of social problems. In this sense, Citizen Professionalism has an educational task crucial to today’s need to learn how to be citizens with a cooperative attitude. In fact, whilst market competition has boosted individualism, an excess of State welfare has encouraged citizens to delegate their every decision and action to professionals or experts. The purpose of the article is to show how the reasons for the effectiveness of community approaches, particularly Doherty’s, can be demonstrated through sociological theory: rather than being evidence-based only, this it is founded on the centrality of human and corporate agency to the process of social change and to building personal and social well-being.