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***APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING*** In occasion of the next conference of the Italian Society of Economic Sociology (SISEC), we are proposing a session entitled “*Between Investment and Austerity: welfare facing social innovation*”. The session aims at collecting contributions on contemporary trends in welfare research, with particular attention to *social investment*, *welfare recalibration, social innovation, social impact finance and workplace welfare arrangements.* The conference is going to be held in Catholic University, Milano January 25 th-27th 2018 and it will attract international and national researchers around the contemporary debates of economic sociology. For those willing to contribute, you have to send a long abstract (1500 words) to [log in to unmask] (object: “Call for papers SISEC 2018 – Session 15”) by October 16th. The full CfP follows along for your convenience. Thanks for your attention A. Ciarini (Sapienza University of Rome), R. Lodigiani (Catholic University of Milan), L. Maestripieri (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) *#SISEC2018 Conference* Session 15: *Between Investment and Austerity: welfare facing social innovation* The economic crisis and the fiscal compact’s measures adopted for facing the crisis of the sovereign debts has negatively impacted on welfare’s recalibration process, increasing inequalities in access to social security and igniting process of marginalisation that distributed the costs of austerity unequally across social groups. At the same time, the goals at the basis of European Social Agenda (explicitly framed in the social investment approach) are pursued in several countries by costs’ savings strategies which concur at expanding or keeping unaltered the level of social interventions, but at the cost of new and deeper trade-offs. Trade-offs that lies between the increase of coverage rates in services for new social risks and low-waged labour in the same services; between access to minimum income schemes and work-first activation strategies in community services; between public and private expenditure, being it of financial nature (*social impact finance*) or occupational (*workplace welfare arrangements/ employee welfare benefits*). If in austerity times a “low” road-map to *social investment* is likely to emerge as a convergence perspective among European countries, empirical investigations can also be found as well that show how bottom-up reactions are emerging, with the aim of counterbalancing the public retrenchment and of innovating in content and practices the welfare supply, also thanks to new technologies. Process of hybridisation are also emerging, in which public and private tends to contaminate, in seek of unprecedented solutions not necessarily guided by costs containment. The session proposed in SISEC 2018 aspires at collecting empirical and theoretical contributions with the aim of investigating effects of different process of change in European, Italian and locally-based experiences, within case studies or in comparative perspective. Starting from this viewpoint, we invite papers that deals with the following phenomena: - New and old inequalities in access to social services, which the post-crisis welfare system is not able to face; - Trade-offs related to local welfare supply, care labour market (formal and informal), public and private social expenditure; - Process of hybridisation between public and private actors in local welfare, between privatisation and neo-mutualism, informal welfare and technological innovation; - Process of social innovation able to retrieve richness and diversity of civil society, in order to offer new solutions to needs that private and public actors are not able to satisfy; Paper are welcome in Italian and English. The full call for papers is available at the conference website: http://sociologia-economica.it/?p=34150#more-34150