Socialing is a neologism deriving from the fusion between “social” and “marketing”, embodying the will to combine the worlds of business management culture, digital economy and not-for-profit. Nowadays, the word Marketing is almost completely devoid of any ethical and cultural significance.
Unfortunately Marketing has faded and collapsed into a sterile attempt to influence needs and consumption. “Since I have to sell, I want to convince you!” All of us, inert and defenceless, witness every day this torment of offers, promotions, symbolic seductions. Most of our social life is systematically brought down to our condition of consumers. We do not try to understand our real needs, and instead we end up adhering to superficial socio-cultural standards.
Probably, Marketing and consumerism devalued the inner, deeper meaning of human experience in its sharing dimension.
Etymologically, Economy derives from the Greek oikonomia, meaning the government of the house and village. Unfortunately, despite the good intentions in retrieving the old values, we witness a dramatic turnaround. The modern and contemporary economies are not serving our needs but, on the contrary, we are serving the demands of an increasingly distant economy, detached from us and our real needs. Many of us reacted by devoting their efforts to the not-for-profit world. However this sector is defined negatively from the for-profit, and hence is destined to a marginal role.
Others felt that the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives could provide us meaningful answers. These initiatives, however, often turn out to be exterior attempts to build social prominence, often hiding opportunistic behaviours or, worse, exploitation. There is a need for a new paradigm, a new approach, new founding principles to reverse this perilous cultural drift.
By making a creative use of the managerial skills and of categories of the economic thought, it is possible to reach awareness of the preponderance of the human and social dimensions in the exchanges between economic organizations operating for profit and solidarity.
Socialing begins from the assumption that the centrality of models and business strategies should integrate more closely with the cross-fertilization of knowledge deriving from diverse fields of research, including the social sciences, economic psychology and cultural anthropology. If the reference to the inter-disciplinary approach is not new in itself, Socialing, seen as a cultural opportunity and a paradigm of thought, can probably exert a significant influence on the way we work, communicate and share.
Socialing approach arises from the need to “re-read” the economic transformations experienced throughout the second half of the twentieth century in the light of those in place at the beginning of the new millennium, in the current socio-political context of the advanced economies in crisis, in an effort to grasp, in particular, the most authentic cultural matrix.
More recently, over the last few years, we witnessed the vigorous growth of the economies of emerging countries such as China and India. Business strategies that, in the past, determined the success of Western companies must now be profoundly rethought in the light of a new vision capable of activating consensing, meaning the building of consensus around a model of participatory economy.
We face an unmissable historical opportunity: the structural crisis of a paradigm to which we owe much, but that is incapable to meet the Italian and European challenges awaiting us.