Law and Metaphors of Inter-Professional Conflicts in Action： The Case of Home-Care Health Professionals of Cosenza＇s Provincial Health Action Zone （Italy）

Health care and social service professions are always at the core of intense transformation processes in Italian municipal welfare. The inter-professionality (IP) should be the guiding principle of these processes of learning between social and health professionals, but more often it is the weak point of welfare systems. However, partnership in integrated home care assistance remains a crucial issue of Italian and international health and social care policies. Recent (federal and local) legislation (National Act No. 328/2000 and Calabria Regional Act No. 548/2006) makes this practice a legal imperative in southern regions of Italy such as Calabria. In this social policy arena, IP conflicts are often outcomes of the interpretation process of legal rules (intended as juridical texts) carried out by legal discourse communities, in which health and social home care professionals use law as a procedural structure of conflict. Through these discourses, professionals elaborate metaphors that link distinct phenomena with a specific rethorical logic. These metaphors approach different phenomena, and by doing so make available meanings that caregivers use for adapting and modifying their concrete professional practices. The paper will present in a heuristic key a theoretical model of sociology for inter-professional conflicts that intertwines cycles of institutional