Exploring Demographic Decision-Making.

Crucial passages in the life course are not necessarily driven by 'rational' motivations or goals. "Exploring the demographic decision-making" denies the self-sufficiency of the neo-classical interpretation, and dwells upon two issues: the form and role of the primary anthropological networks (the inertial continuity of the family patterns, and the changing form of the blood pacts) and the role played by non-cognitive factors in the decision-making of demographic behavior. The author leads to acknowledge and appreciate the double meaning of such concepts as perception and insecurity, and discovers the crucial role of moods in conditioning intentions and behavior. A complex syntax among many disciplinary contributions is thus reconstructed, threading different mechanisms that trigger a change in the transitional behavior.
"Exploring the demographic decision-making" can not be considered as a core textbook, but rather as a research monograph, to be used on courses concerning Sociology of Family & the Life-Course, Family Demography, Psychology of Ageing. Though it focuses on the peculiar demographic changes in the current Mediterranean society, nevertheless it can easily be extended to the changing behavior in Eastern Europe, or in other outskirts of the world. Language formalisms or logical-mathematical symbolisms are avoided: instead, the elementary concepts of the daily life are used, and the historical frames in which the concepts emerged and acquired sense are reconstructed.

Giuseppe A. Micheli is professor of Demography and Chairman of the Institute of Population and Geographical Studies at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart, Milan. He has published extensively on internal and international migrations, social policies and housing, aging and epidemiology of mental disorders, as well as topics of mathematical models of population dynamics. He has been in the editorial board of European Journal of population, and in the scientific board of Genus. He is component of the Italian Council of Social Sciences.