Social generativity: an introduction

Social generativity is a distinctive social phenomenon apt to enlighten the relation between personal development and social change. It is an empirically observable process – as generative social action – accomplished in three movements (bringing into the world, taking care and releasing), producing a dynamic social bond which opposes hyperindividualization and bureaucratization by strengthening individuation and institutional pluralisation. Viewed as a talking action, social generativity produces effects, which are disseminated along the three axes of intersubjectivity (authorization), intertemporality (durability), and contextuality (exemplarity). Such ‘perlocutionary’ effects, recognizable only in retrospect, result from empowering others and by encouraging them to take initiatives and to contribute to social change. This process, in turn, acts back on the initiator strengthening his/her motivation, self-understanding and desire for agency. When it works (overcoming its own internal ambivalences), the generative social action displays an expansionary as well as innovative dynamic triggering social change.