INTRODUCTION TO SOCIALING

Meanwhile, the word “marketing” has almost completely lost its ethical and cultural meaning. Artificial Intelligence, new digital platforms and social networks are the new communication frontier to enter the Digital Transformation 4.0.

In particular, a large part of our social life is systematically reduced to that of a consumer. We no longer try to understand what we really need, but end up adhering to sterile socio-cultural canons that are predominantly external. The ecological and social malaise generated by this consumer society is becoming increasingly evident. Attempts to civilize and humanize this type of social and economic organization have remained in the realm of “good intentions”.

Unfortunately, despite the good intentions and ESG values so often invoked, there has been a reversal with dramatic results. The modern and contemporary economy is not serving our needs, but we are serving the needs of an economy that is increasingly distant from us and our most authentic feelings.

Many of us have responded by devoting ourselves to the third sector, sometimes referred to as the nonprofit sector. Only already defined in these negative terms, it is limited to a residual activity compared to the for-profit world.

Others thought that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) could give us meaningful answers. Unfortunately, in many cases they have turned out to be external operations of accreditation and social reputation that hide opportunistic or, worse, malicious behavior.

A new paradigm, a new approach, new founding principles are needed to reverse this dangerous cultural drift. This need becomes even more compelling with the exponential development of generative artificial intelligence.

By creatively enhancing management skills and the categories of economic thought, we can come to an awareness of the primacy of the human and social dimensions in exchanges between economic organizations that operate both on the principle of profit and with purposes of social solidarity. Utopia? certainly ambitious, but not unrealistic within the framework of European culture and the social market economy.

While the call for interdisciplinarity is not new per se, socialing, understood as a cultural opportunity and paradigm of thought, may have a significant impact on the way we work, communicate, and live together.

More recently, over the past few years, there has been a dizzying economic development of emerging countries such as China and India. Business strategies that, in the past, had decreed the success of Western companies now need to be profoundly rethought in the light of a new vision capable of activating socialing (i.e. creating consensus around a model of participatory economics).