La Consigliera di Fiducia: una figura in via di definizione. Spunti per un dibattito

e article delves into the role and activities of the Confidential Counsellor, originally introduced by some soft law documents of the European Union and currently active especially in the public administrations in the Italian context, in order to prevent and manage cases of work-related hardships. This social actor performs his or her activities within a complex regulatory framework that includes supranational norms, national legislation and self-regulatory acts. Moreover, he or she acts within the organizational and relational processes of the specific workplace and its “organizational culture”. On a theoretical level, each specific workplace, either public or private, where the Confidential Counsellor carries out his or her activities, is conceived as a semi-autonomous social field, according to the well-known elaboration of Sally Falk Moore (1973), with which individual workplaces share many characteristics; in these contexts, the Confidential Counsellor “mediates” among existing rules and relationships. The article explores a number of critical issues related to the role and activities of the Confidential Counsellors in the Italian context, who can be regarded as figures yet to be defined. The author’s considerations draw from today’s law documents, the scarce literature on the subject, the author’s own experience as a Confidential Counsellor, and on the first data collected from an exploratory study carried out, through questionnaires, in the early months of 2020.