From Policy to Practice: The Relational Cost of Digital Welfare - Evidence From Italy’s Reddito di Cittadinanza

The digital transformation of welfare systems has reshaped the organizational and epistemic dimensions of social work. Focusing on the Italian Minimum Income Scheme (Reddito di Cittadinanza), whose implementation relied extensively on the GePI platform for the management of social inclusion agreements, this chapter examines how technology- mediated environments reconfigure professional practices and organizational routines. Drawing on a case study conducted in the municipality of Modena, the analysis adopts the perspective of both frontline professionals and policy recipients to foreground the experiential knowledge emerging from their interaction with digitally mediated welfare provision. Narrative data collected through interviews and focus groups are analyzed adopting a Corpus- Assisted Discourse Studies approach to explore how the policy is enacted in practice. The findings highlight how digital infrastructures reshape relational work and redistribute discretionary spaces, producing new tensions between procedural standardization and the relational dimension of social assistance.