Tesi sul tema "Settore SPS/07 - Sociologia Generale"

Di recente la Pubblica amministrazione si è resa conto che l’operato del Terzo settore ha effetti positivi sull’intera comunità e da questo ha deciso pian piano di condividere con esso alcuni programmi e progettazioni di interventi. L’obiettivo di questo studio è comprendere al meglio come si è modificato il rapporto tra Enti Pubblici e Terzo settore e, in particolare, verrà analizzata la situazione degli enti non profit. Al giorno d’oggi si è riusciti a superare la logica di fornitore, in cui la P.A. domanda servizi e definisce cosa fare e il Terzo settore offre servizi ed esegue passivamente le richieste, ma si potrà arrivare ad una logica in cui il mondo del non profit comincerà a parlare di impresa sociale di comunità riuscendo a cooperare in modo efficiente ed efficace con la pubblica amministrazione? Dopo un accurato studio della nuova normativa del Terzo settore, il cosiddetto Codice del Terzo settore (CTS) che ha contribuito in modo decisivo ad una svolta nei rapporti tra i due soggetti, per rispondere alla domanda di ricerca verranno sottoposti questionari ad alcune realtà non profit del veneziano, per capire al meglio anche il loro punto di vista. Da questo studio si svelerà che in realtà Enti pubblici e Terzo settore non sono controparti ma alleati per realizzare insieme una finalità comune: ad oggi il CTS ha dato una grande mano al Terzo settore ma per arrivare a una cooperazione in senso proprio c’è ancora molta strada da fare.

Il presente lavoro si pone l’obiettivo di indagare quale funzione assume la leadership nei contesti della Pubblica Amministrazione, con particolare riferimento al settore sociale, e del Terzo Settore. Nella prima parte dell’elaborato vengono delineati alcuni concetti chiave, come quello di burocrazia, che risultano utili per comprendere le dinamiche organizzative della Pubblica Amministrazione; inoltre, vengono illustrate le principali teorie sulla leadership, dando ampio spazio al ruolo del leader come agente di cambiamento. Nella seconda parte, l’attenzione viene focalizzata sul Terzo Settore, di cui vengono descritte le caratteristiche, l’articolazione strutturale, le modalità di funzionamento e le diverse realtà presenti in ambito italiano. La terza parte espone i risultati di una ricerca condotta con il metodo dell’intervista in profondità: si trattava di interviste semi-strutturate, con libertà da parte degli intervistati di esprimere in libertà il proprio punto di vista. Sono stati intervistati tre differenti professionisti, che svolgono ruoli di rilievo nelle rispettive organizzazioni: più specificatamente, sono stati intervistati l’assistente sociale e la responsabile dei servizi sociali di due distinti comuni del piovese ed il presidente di una cooperativa sociale del conselvano. Gli aspetti trattati durante le interviste riguardano i processi decisionali e gestionali che caratterizzano l’ente di appartenenza e la percezione che i soggetti hanno delle abilità e delle competenze del leader. A partire dalle risposte fornite, viene formulata un’approfondita riflessione su alcune variabili cruciali per la leadership, calandole nelle realtà della Pubblica Amministrazione e del Terzo Settore. Infine, in appendice al testo viene riportata la trascrizione delle tre interviste.

Lo studio dal titolo “I lavoratori bangladesi nel settore turistico veneziano e l'impatto della prima ondata di Covid-19” esamina l’inserimento lavorativo della comunità bangladese del comune veneziano nell’economia turistica del centro storico di Venezia e l’influenza della prima ondata di pandemia di coronavirus nella vita degli immigrati bangladesi occupati nel turismo. La ricerca si svolge in una delle città con maggiore carico turistico al mondo, la cui economia, di conseguenza, è rivolta soprattutto al settore turistico. Questi due fattori hanno contributo a fenomeni di gentrification sia da un punto di vista abitativo, sia lavorativo, comportando, da un lato, una sostituzione della popolazione residente con soggetti che la abitano e usufruiscono dei servizi offerti secondo modalità “intermittenti” (turisti, possessori di seconde case, etc.) e, dall’altro lato, un cambio di nazionalità della forza-lavoro impiegata nel settore turistico. Il target della ricerca è la componente dei lavoratori bangladesi che, negli anni, è stata protagonista un intenso insediamento nel contesto veneziano, richiamata dalle opportunità lavorative, offerte nei settori turistico e della cantieristica navale. Nello specifico, la ricerca ha approfondito i seguenti aspetti: il ruolo della collettività prima nell’avvio della carriera lavorativa e poi all’arrivo della pandemia, la figura della donna nel mondo del lavoro, il declassamento sociale, legato alla migrazione internazionale che spinge gli immigrati bangladesi a svolgere lavori a bassa qualifica nonostante nel Paese di origine avessero acquisito competenze specifiche e titoli di studio elevati, l’acuirsi delle disuguaglianze a seguito della pandemia di coronavirus. La ricerca si è avvalsa di un mixed methods design, utilizzando, cioè, sia tecniche quantitative sia qualitative. Si è proceduto, cioè, alla revisione della letteratura sul lavoro immigrato nel settore turistico e sulle misure di tutela emanate. Si è fatto uso di dati statistici secondari, con costruzione di grafici e modelli, che evidenziano in termini numerici l'insediamento della componente bangladese della popolazione nel comune veneziano, l'andamento delle assunzioni e delle attivazioni di contratti a chiamata a “favore” di lavoratori bangladesi, delle aperture di attività di proprietà di cittadini bangladesi e l'impatto della prima fase della pandemia su tutti gli istituti di lavoro sopra citati. Successivamente, sono state raccolte diciassette interviste dialogiche, utilizzate per l’analisi dell’esperienza dei soggetti coinvolti. Dallo studio si evince quindi l’inserimento crescente della comunità bangladese nel settore turistico veneziano, infatti la scelta della città di Venezia avviene in subordine alle opportunità lavorative anche del settore turistico e alla rete comunitaria. Inoltre a causa del mancato riconoscimento del titolo di studio gli individui sono costretti ad occupare posizioni unskilled proprio nel settore in esame. Dalla pandemia di Covid-19 emerge un drastico rallentamento delle assunzioni e avvio di attività turistiche, di conseguenza il mancato recepimento di reddito provoca precarietà abitativa, famigliare, giuridica e di mantenimento della famiglia in patria; nonostante ciò le famiglie beneficiano di una maggior presenza maschile nelle mura domestiche. Si deduce anche che a seguito del coronavirus il settore dei portabagagli risulta di difficile indagine per un mancato contatto. Infine, si desume il ruolo della donna non coinvolta nel mercato del lavoro, ma dedita alla cura della casa e dei figli.

L’objet de cette étude est le Mouvement des Focolari. Fondé à Trente (Italie) en 1943 par Chiara Lubich, il naît de la contestation de l’Église et du monde. Le concept d’utopie nous permet d’analyser le déploiement de cette organisation religieuse au sein de l’institution ecclésiale et dans les sociétés actuelles. L’utopie religieuse des focolarins conduit à une nouvelle conception de la religiosité et à une réforme de l’Église. La réhabilitation des laïcs, de la virtuosité religieuse et de la sainteté à laquelle les focolarins aspiraient, sera sanctionnée par le concile Vatican II. Si la virginité apparaît comme l’instrument de la contestation, le Mouvement désirera rapidement s’adresser à tous les individus. La volonté de révolutionner les domaines social, culturel et économique entraîne la création de villes idéales et d’une utopédagogie et aboutit à la proposition d’une alternative globale qui se veut universalisable. Anticipant ou s’inscrivant dans les grandes tendances des sociétés ultramodernes (notamment l’individualisme, la différenciation des sphères sociétales et la mondialisation), les focolarins cherchent actuellement à systématiser différentes notions (telles la fraternité, l’égalité et la liberté) afin de parvenir à l’unité de l’humanité.

Il sistema di welfare in Italia ha subito negli ultimi vent'anni una radicale trasformazione, in parte dovuta al ridimensionamento delle risorse economiche destinate alla protezione sociale, in parte alla riforma delle modalità di programmazione e gestione delle prestazioni. Al fine di migliorare il funzionamento dei servizi sociali, di realizzare pienamente i principi espressi dalle legge quadro 328/2000 e di riavvicinare le istituzioni alle comunità, la programmazione e l'erogazione dei servizi sono state aperte a nuovi attori del sociale come gli enti del terzo settore. Questi attori, forti della conoscenza dei territori nei quali operano, hanno favorito la transizione dal vecchio modello di welfare state, al nuovo modello di welfare mix caratterizzato da una co-partecipazione nei processi di implementazione delle politiche sociali (tanto a livello decisionale quanto a livello attuativo), tra le istituzioni territoriali, gli enti del terzo settore e l'insieme degli individui facenti parte delle comunità locali. In questo nuovo paradigma di welfare, che ha preso la denominazione di welfare community, si vuole ripensare alle modalità di progettazione degli interventi nei territori mettendo al centro la comunità, un soggetto ricco di potenzialità e capace, tramite l'aiuto del terzo settore e la supervisione dei servizi sociali, di trovare al proprio interno le risorse per fronteggiare i problemi.

In this text I investigated how the political choices about health rights and house polices could affect the personal biographies. I chose to engage my research among two vulnerable social groups, actually, undocumented migrants and homeless people and I noticed that their rights are constantly neglected by the public institutions. By consequence, the civil society is strongly engage in the social support of these people. In the place where I carried out research I practiced the participative observation and I collected many interviews. From this sources I noticed that the people who attend these places demand practical assistance as well as psychological and affective support. In fact, the interviewed used to express really high expectations toward the aid workers who operate in the consulting rooms or in the homeless shelters and these expectations are related to a personal recognition’s request. The personal recognition is a process that affect many settings, such as the relationship with the family and the partner, but also the social and political experience. Usually the personal recognition is completed by the political participation and the interaction with the public institutions; however, for the vulnerable people I met this is not possible, because they are legally or informally excluded from the political-institutional sphere. For this reason undocumented migrants and homeless people could make experience of complete recognition only by the relationships with the civil society. In this way the civil society’s associations are taking charge of a great responsibility but they are not able to satisfied it completely. This situation is increasing the crisis of the social bound.

Il nostro lavoro si propone come uno sguardo-attraverso il pensiero di Alfred Schütz, al fine di evidenziare il leit motiv del lavoro del sociologo-filosofo austriaco, ovvero quello della costruzione e condivisione della realtà da parte degli attori sociali. Il punto di partenza è costituito dall’analisi del saggio del 1945 di Schütz Sulle realtà multiple, in cui l’autore si prefigge lo scopo di affrontare la questione della realtà riprendendo le analisi compiute da William James sul tale questione, e esposte in un celebre capitolo de I Principii di psicologia. Schütz assume la definizione jamesiana del reale affermando che tutto quello che assorbe e riesce a trattenere la nostra attenzione, orientando il nostro sentire ed agire, è in qualche modo reale, e riprende l’idea di James delle molteplici realtà in cui vive il soggetto umano, ma anziché parlare di “sotto-universi”, utilizza l’espressione “province finite di significato” per sottolineare che la realtà sia costituita dall’insieme delle nostre esperienze, e non dalla struttura ontologica della realtà. Inoltre egli, nel saggio Don Chisciotte e il problema della realtà, finisce per ancorare la questione della realtà al tema della costruzione intersoggettiva di essa: ciò che intendiamo per reale e come reale è ciò che crediamo reale. Ma tale credenza è possibile solo se convalidata intersoggettivamente, ovvero se è il risultato di un accordo intersoggettivo che si basa in parte sulla tradizione di ogni gruppo sociale e in parte è costantemente riprodotto e confermato dall’attiva prestazione di fede da parte degli attori sociali. Pertanto si è cercato di dimostrare come la questione dell’intersoggettività si dimostri fondamentale ai fini del rapporto tra fenomenologia e scienze umane, e in particolar modo per la fondazione di una sociologia di stampo fenomenologico quale quella di Alfred Schütz, che riprendendo la lezione di Max Weber, riconosce, che tutte le scienze sociali si occupano del problema della comprensione dell’azione umana, e inverte l’impostazione husserliana che collocava la radice dell’alterità e quindi dell’intersoggettività nella struttura del singolo soggetto. Schütz colloca la questione dell’intersoggettività non nell’ambito della fenomenologia trascendentale, ma in quella dell’atteggiamento naturale, ovvero nel mondo della vita quotidiana, che, per lui, è fin dall’inizio un mondo intersoggettivo. In tal modo l’ego non è più una monade solitaria, senza possibilità di contatto con altri ego, e quindi può, sempre insieme ad altri ego, costituire un mondo specificatamente umano, ovvero una dimensione, una “comunità sociale”. Questo punto ci ha permesso di soffermarci sulla fenomenologia del mondo sociale proposta da Schütz, e sull’analisi delle caratteristiche del mondo della vita quotidiana che lo rendono la “realtà preminente”, e di far notare, in limine, come la riflessione di Schütz non si limiti solo alla mera constatazione che il mondo della vita quotidiana sia la realtà fondamentale, ma come egli vada oltre proponendo una “serie di principi metodologici” che siano adeguati alle scienze sociali e ad una sociologia fenomenologica, e che non si rivelino fallimentari nel campo dell’intersoggettività.
Our work sets out as an overview regarding the thoughts of Alfred Schütz in order to highlight the Austrian sociologist and philosopher ‘s leitmotif , in other words a look at the construction and sharing of reality by the actors socially involved. Our starting point is the analysis of Schultz’s 1945 essay on multiple realities, where the author seeks to address the issue of reality and takes into consideration the analyses carried out by William James regarding this topic and depicted in his famous chapter found in Principles of Psychology. Schütz takes on the Jamesian definition of reality affirming that everything that absorbs and manages to hold our attention, directing our feelings and our our reactions, is in some way real. He picks up on the idea of James’s multiple realities within which human beings live, however instead of talking about “sub universes or alternative universes,” he utilizes the term, “significant finite provinces” in order to underline the fact that reality is the set of our experiences and does not involve the ontological structure of reality. Furthermore, in his essay on Don Quixote and the issue of reality, he ends up anchoring the question of reality regarding the theme of its inter -subjective construction. In other words, what do we mean as real and what is real as we perceive as real. This type of thinking is possible only if it is validated by inter -subjectively, in other words, it is the result of an inter- subjective agreement that is based, in part on the tradition of each social group and that is constantly reproduced and confirmed by the active performance of faith on behalf of the actors involved. Therefore, we have tried to demonstrate how the question of inter -subjectivity proves crucial in regards to the relationship between phenomenology and human sciences. In particular, we find the establishment of a type of sociology based on phenomenology as in the case of Alfred Schütz, who follows the lesson of Max Weber and acknowledges that all the social sciences deal with the problem of the understanding of human actions and reverses the Husserl impostition that placed the foundation of the “other” and hence the idea of inter-subjectivity on the individual’s structure. Schütz does not place the question of inter subjectivity in the realm of transcendental phenomenology, but in the natural sphere, which involves everyday life. For Schütz, this has always been an inter -subjective world. In this manner, one’s ego is no longer a solitary monad, with the possibility of meeting any other alter egos. Therefore, one can, together with other egos, make up a world which is specifically human, in other words a a dimension or a “social community.” This point has allowed us to concentrate on the phenomenology of the social world as proposed by Schütz and dwell on the analysis of the characteristics of the world’s everyday life which makes us note that, from the onset, as we can see in Schütz ‘s reflections. He does not limit his considerations to the mere fact that the world of everyday life is the fundamental reality. He goes beyond by considering a series of methodological principles which are relevant to the Social Sciences and to the field of phenomenological sociology which does not turn out to be unsuccessful in the area of inter-subjectivity.

La vita dei bambini delle città occidentali contemporanee sembra essere sempre più caratterizzata dalla mancanza di autonomia di movimento. Tale limite ha conseguenze sia sui bambini stessi sia sulla società più in generale. Partendo da queste premesse il lavoro si pone gli obiettivi di: conoscere le pratiche della vita quotidiana dei bambini “raccontate” dalla voce dei bambini stessi, verificare la presenza e i livelli di autonomia di cui i bambini dispongono nella loro quotidianità e, infine, individuare eventuali relazioni esistenti tra modalità di utilizzazione dei propri spazi e livello di autonomia disponibile. L’indagine è stata svolta attraverso la metodologia delle Time Use Survey su una popolazione di 267 bambini frequentanti la classe V elementare delle scuole della città di Campobasso nell’anno scolastico 2009/2010. I risultati ottenuti forniscono informazioni riguardanti le caratteristiche socio-demografiche della popolazione analizzata, la descrizione degli elementi principali della vita quotidiana dei bambini (attività, persone e luoghi), la proposta di un modello di autonomia e le relazioni esistenti tra uso degli spazi e autonomia.
The lives of children in contemporary Western cities seems to be increasingly characterized by the lack of freedom of movement. This limit has consequences both on the children themselves and on society. On these basis the work’s objectives are: knowledge of the practices of everyday life of children "told" by themselves voices, to verify the presence and levels of autonomy that children have in their daily lives and, finally, identify any relationship between the use of their own space and level of autonomy. The survey was conducted through the methodology of the Time Use Survey on a population of 267 children attending the last year of the primary schools in the city of Campobasso in the school year 2009/2010. The results provide information on socio-demographic characteristics of the analyzed population, the description of the main elements of the children’s daily life (activities, people and places), the proposal of a model of autonomy and the relationship between the use of space and autonomy.

La presente Tesi di Dottorato presenta un’analisi della vita quotidiana dei bambini e dell’autonomia degli stessi nel tempo libero. Una indagine sull’Uso del Tempo condotta in maggio 2010 con bambini di quinta elementare delle scuole di Campobasso (Italia), ha permesso di raccogliere ed esaminare utili informazioni che descrivono sia l’allocazione del tempo sia le forme di autonomia nelle attività giornaliere. I risultati indicano che il tempo quotidiano feriale “libero”, svincolato cioè da obbligo, ammonta a 4 ore (ovvero al 17% delle 24 ore), mentre il tempo quotidiano feriale “liberato”, svincolato cioè sia da obbligo sia da controllo dell’adulto, è di appena 44 minuti (pari al 3% circa di una giornata). L’ammontare di questo tempo varia in relazione all’autonomia: a livelli più alti di autonomia corrisponde una maggiore disponibilità di tempo libero. Inoltre, i bambini più autonomi risultano essere figli di genitori (madri soprattutto) più indipendenti.
This Ph.D Thesis presents an analysis of children's daily life and children’s autonomy in free time. A Time Use Survey carried out in May 2010 with children attending the last class of Primary schools in Campobasso (Italy), has allowed to collect and analyze relevant information describing both the allocation of time and the forms of autonomy in daily activities. The results indicate that the daily discretionary time of children free from obligation is 4 hours (17% of daily time), but the daily leasure time free from both obligation and adult supervision is just 44 minutes (3% of daily time). The amount of this time varies in relation to empowerment: the higher level of autonomy, the higher availability of free time. In addition, it can be argued that children more indipendent have parents (mothers in particular) more indipendent.

Children are human beings - just for the young and the resulting vulnerability – that need special protection. And, in the phase of childhood there is the foundations were laid for the realization of the adult life: ensure a happy and free from worries or problems about making sure to child the chance to become a happy adult, and made responsible. Therefore, any economic or social situation that might impair the proper growth and development of the child shall be a violation of his rights. Development cooperation aims primarily to contribute to raising the level of protection of the rights of children worldwide. Although on the rights of children we have, now, internationally, a comprehensive legislation and universally shared, millions of girls and children and adolescents in the world continue to suffer abuses of all kinds, just read the daily news, the reports of NGOs, the UN Commission on Human Rights or the Committee on the Rights of the Child United Nations. The development cooperation is directed towards solving these problems by addressing the most serious problems affecting children in situation of vulnerability and risk in many parts of the world. In this work we examined the Italian development cooperation and its approach to children's rights, at first, we analyzed the governmental cooperation implemented by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after which the non-governmental cooperation and decentralized into being by the NGOs and institutions local, then a research was made of field on some of the major Italian NGOs that deal with childhood and adolescence and we analyzed a cooperation project carried out by an Italian NGO in Morocco, Algeria, France, Spain and Italy on the protection of migrant children. In the work We try to answer a fundamental question: in times of crisis, financial, economic and, sometimes, also of values, can the non-governmental development cooperation, and particularly the decentralized one, save the Italian cooperation and bring it back the momentum they need to regain confidence and effectiveness of the Italians, and give Italy an important place in the international arena that deals with development?
I bambini sono esseri umani che - proprio per la giovane età e la conseguente vulnerabilità - hanno bisogno di una specifica protezione. E’ nella fase dell’infanzia che si pongono le basi per la realizzazione della vita da adulto: garantire un’infanzia felice e libera da preoccupazioni e problemi significa assicurare al bambino la possibilità di diventare un adulto felice, realizzato e responsabile. Quindi qualsiasi situazione economica o sociale che possa mettere in pericolo la corretta crescita e lo sviluppo del minore costituisce una violazione dei suoi diritti. La cooperazione allo sviluppo si pone come obiettivo principale quello di contribuire all’innalzamento del livello di protezione dei diritti dei bambini su scala mondiale. Nonostante in materia di diritti dell’infanzia si disponga, ormai, a livello internazionale, di una normativa esauriente e universalmente condivisa, milioni di bambine e bambini e di adolescenti nel mondo continuano a subire soprusi di ogni tipo: basta leggere le cronache quotidiane, i rapporti delle Ong, della Commissione ONU per i diritti umani o del Comitato per i diritti del fanciullo delle Nazioni Unite. La cooperazione alo sviluppo si orienta verso la risoluzione di questi problemi affrontando le problematiche più gravi che colpiscono i minori in situazioni di vulnerabilità e rischio in tante parti del mondo. In questo lavoro si è esaminata la cooperazione allo sviluppo italiana e l’approccio ai diritti dell’infanzia; dapprima, si è analizzata la cooperazione governativa attuata dal Ministero degli Esteri; successivamente la cooperazione non governativa e decentrata posta in essere dalle ong e dagli enti locali; è stata realizzata quindi una ricerca di campo su alcune tra le maggiori ong italiane che si occupano di infanzia e di adolescenza ed è stato analizzato un progetto di cooperazione realizzato da una ong italiana in Marocco, Algeria, Francia, Spagna e Italia sulla tutela dei minori migranti. Nel lavoro si cerca di rispondere a un quesito fondamentale: in tempi di crisi, finanziaria, economica e, a volte, anche di valori, può la cooperazione allo sviluppo non governativa, e in particolare quella decentrata, salvare la cooperazione italiana e ridarle quello slancio di cui ha bisogno per riacquistare efficacia e fiducia da parte degli Italiani, e ridare all’Italia un posto importante nello scacchiere internazionale che si occupa di sviluppo?

La tesi ha lo scopo principale di mostrare come, nel contesto regionale molisano, l’approccio di ricerca delineato dal processo di costruzione di una mappa di comunità, possa essere molto efficace per fornire utili elementi di sviluppo locale. Il tentativo di ricerca è stato quello di esplorare il piccolo comune molisano di San Polo Matese attraverso chi lo abita, lo amministra o lo gestisce, cercando di rilevare, grazie al processo di costruzione della ‘mappa di comunità’, dati qualitativi utili a comprendere il rapporto che localmente si crea tra abitanti e proprio patrimonio locale. Le ‘parish maps’ inglesi nacquero a metà degli anni Ottanta proprio per riportare lo sguardo e l’interesse di operatori, ricercatori e agenti vari di sviluppo verso quei posti poco considerati, marginali rispetto ai grandi centri di produzione economica, dove però si conservavano interessanti risorse per un altro tipo di sviluppo. Da quella tradizione inglese si arriva fino alla diffusione in Italia delle prime ‘mappe di comunità’ ad inizio degli anni Duemila. La tesi è suddivisa in due parti: nella prima vengono presentati i termini e concetti chiave del lavoro nella loro evoluzione storica e si delinea il quadro interpretativo che servirà per svolgere lo studio di caso. Nella seconda parte si entra nel dettaglio di quanto sperimentato a San polo Matese dalla primavera 2012 fino all’estate 2014 attraverso il processo di costruzione della prima ‘mappa di comunità’ in Molise. Una ricerca pilota regionale condotta secondo una strategia esplorativa di raccolta ed interpretazione di dati ‘in-profondità’ tra gli abitanti. L’approccio di fondo del lavoro è quello che guarda alla dimensione del ‘luogo’ come spazio dotato di un carattere specifico la cui riscoperta è conditio sine qua non per eventuali iniziative di sviluppo locale o almeno di sopravvivenza. Una riflessione critica e una revisione sul tema del “patrimonio locale” possono fornire un orientamento teorico sia operativo che pratico per riempire quella crepa tra passato e futuro che caratterizza fortemente i piccoli comuni molisani. Il lavoro si conclude definendo la replicabilità dell’approccio ‘mappa di comunità’ su scala regionale. La possibilità di creare un modello territoriale molisano sulla base di ricerche come quella che costituisce l’argomento centrale di questa tesi, poggia su una peculiarità regionale così come su alcune caratteristiche endogene che potrebbero significare quasi un ‘vantaggio’ per il Molise.
The principal aim of this thesis is to show how, in the regional context of Molise, the research approach outlined by the ‘mappa di comunità’ building process, can be very effective to provide useful elements of local development. The core of research was to explore a small municipality of San Polo Matese in Molise region through its inhabitants, administrators and local operators, trying to detect, thanks to ‘mappa di comunità’ building process, qualitative data to understand that relationship locally created between inhabitants and their local heritage. The English parish maps were born in the mid-‘80s in order to move the look and interest of operators, researchers and various agents of development to places considered marginal compared with major centers of economic production, but where interesting resources for another type of development were kept. From that English tradition you get the spread of first ‘mappe di comunità’ in Italy in the early ‘2000s. The thesis content is divided in two parts: the first presents the key terms and concepts of work in their historical evolution and outlining the interpretative framework that will support the case study. The second part goes into detail of what was experienced in San Polo Matese from spring 2012 until summer 2014 through the process of construction of the first ‘mappa di comunità’ in Molise. A regional pilot research conducted according to an explorative strategy of 'in-depth' data collection and interpretation among the inhabitants. Background approach of this work leads to that concept of 'place' as a space with a specific character whose reevaluation is a condition sine qua non for any local development actions or at least of survival in particular territories. A critically review on the topic of ‘local heritage’ can provide a theoretical orientation, both operational and practical, to bridge a gap between past and future that strongly characterizes the small municipalities of Molise. The work concludes by defining the replicability of the ‘mappa di comunità’ approach on a regional scale. The opportunity to create a Molise territory-based model, based on research such as that which constitute the central topic of this thesis, rests on a regional peculiarity as well as on some endogenous features that could mean almost a 'benefit' for Molise.

Nell’ambito del dottorato si è sviluppata una ricerca etnografica sui temi dell’identità in un contesto di diversità culturale, quale quello dell’immigrazione italiana a New York. La ricerca, in particolare, indaga l'identità tra le generazioni, focalizzandosi, sul caso molisano come rappresentativo dell'emigrazione meridionale. L’interesse conoscitivo è stato quello di comprendere come i caratteri socioculturali e etnici, storicamente connotativi i primi emigrati, abbiano inciso sul processo di costruzione dell’identità italo-americana, a partire dall'accoglienza fino all'assimilazione nella società ospitante. Durante il suo svolgimento sul campo, il lavoro si è orientato anche verso l'origine degli stereotipi culturali associati all'identità italo-americana contemporanea, al fine di capire come tali fattori si siano sviluppati attraverso le generazioni di ascendenza meridionale/molisana. Una volta illustrato il contesto storico culturale generale, si presenta il caso di studio del Molise analizzato anche in chiave letteraria attraverso, cioè, le opere di scrittori molisani di spicco emigrati negli Stati Uniti: Dopo l'analisi sul caso di studio specifico, questa prima parte del lavoro si conclude con l'esame delle caratteristiche della società di arrivo. Nella seconda parte del lavoro si traccia il percorso metodologico che ha guidato l'intero progetto, quindi, si elaborano i dati raccolti e si presentano i risultati finali. L'indagine si basa su una metodologia qualitativa di taglio etnografico, che rispetta le caratteristiche tecniche proprie della ricerca sul campo, con finalità di tipo esplorativo e descrittivo. Le motivazioni scientifiche poste alla base della ricerca risiedono prioritariamente nell'analizzare l'identità, e le sue trasformazioni, nel corso delle generazioni anche da un punto di vista interculturale. A questo scopo, si è scelto di focalizzare l’attenzione sui giovani per capire cosa significa essere un italo-americano e quali sono le principali differenze rispetto ai predecessori. Si è, dunque, esaminata la natura dei legami con la terra d’origine e come essi emergono, si manifestano e si trasformano tra i giovani e tra le generazioni. Per meglio indagare questo ultimo aspetto, si è scelto il caso di studio specifico, quello del Molise, cercando di interpretare in che modo l'esperienza migratoria e la conseguente identità di origine è cambiata rispetto alla prima, alla seconda e alla terza generazione. Dall'analisi dei dati si rilevano differenze importanti riguardo l'identità e le generazioni. Sembra emergere l'esigenza di riscoprire le proprie radici culturali sotto una nuova prospettiva, più moderna e scevra dai pregiudizi, ma, che assicuri, allo stesso tempo, una certa continuità culturale. In questo senso, sembra che l'identità italiana sia in grado di aumentare la stima e il prestigio del gruppo di appartenenza, quindi, l'identità culturale all'interno di una società multietnica come quella newyorkese.
The Ph.D research aims at analyzing the cultural identity in a context of change and diversity, such as the immigration experience. From this prospective, the research will be part of a community's study, focusing on the lingering effects of Italian Cultural Heritage (or its signs and traces) after almost two centuries of immigration in the New York City area. For these reasons, the attention will be focused on the new generations, which are interested in having links with their cultural origins. Some goals are:to analyze how the cultural identity has changed in the younger generations in order to reveal the awareness of their origins; to identify the key elements of Italian-American identity, in particular Southern-Italian origins, in order to highlight the formation and evolution of stereotypes through the years linked to Italian cultural; to track the paths of Italian-Americans, in particular of Molise origin, which still have a link (virtual, symbolic or direct) with their origins in order to analyze needs, conflicts, attitudes and values; to identify the crucial factors of the Italian-American immigration experience that can be usefull to deal with the recent immigration phenomenon in Italy; to analyze what is the cultural demand in the youngest generations and to understand how the Italian-American community provide a support for this demand.The research aims analyzed analyze Italian-American cultural identity in New York City and in particular how it has been changing among younger generations. Moreover, the research identified the key elements which describe Italian-American identity in order to understand what being an Italian-American means today despite advanced generations and mixed ancestry. In conclusion, the research provides an interpretative analysis on the cultural identity linked to the immigration process. The Italian culture plays an important role because certain goods (such as food, fashion, art, and creativity) exchanged during the relationships, seem to be more linked to the Italian life style then American. Summing this new form of expression/identification puts Italian-Americans in a historical and social continuum related to Italian immigration's experiences in New York, while at the same time, changes the perception about Italian-American identity linked to these experiences. Italian culture improves interactions without adopting an ethnocentric approach and it seems to have a positive effect on the identity development and psychological well-being of new generations of Italian descendants, especially in New York City where intercultural skills are increasingly required to handle cultural diversity in order to interact successfully within a multiethnic environment.

The thesis takes up debates about emerging ‘cultural class conflicts’ between workers and a left-liberal new middle class. Such conflicts are said to be fought over issues like migration and diversity, law-and-order, or cultural liberalization; and to be rooted in diverging lifestyles and moral intuitions of communitarian, ‘down-to-earth’ workers and cosmopolitan middle class ‘frequent travelers’ (Calhoun 2002). Influential diagnoses describe the conflict of these worldviews as one that pits large sociopolitical groups against one another, not only in the form of ideologically polarized camps, but also on the deeper, more visceral level of social identities. The study interrogates this diagnosis empirically, centering on Germany and using a mixed-method interview- and survey-based design. It reconstructs the contours and sociostructural roots of key ideological divides in the German population, and explores to what extent the social identities of crucial class fractions can be said to polarize along a new set of divides. Guiding the analysis is the analytically most advanced scientific formulation of some of the core assumptions behind the ‘new cultural class conflict’ discourse: scholarship on the rise of a new cleavage of universalism and particularism (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). This research tradition centers on a divide over transnationalization, authoritarianism, and welfare deservingness, articulated by New Left and Radical Right parties, whose class bases are said to be found among middle class sociocultural professionals on the one hand, and production workers on the other. The study contextualizes the diagnosis of a new cleavage as one attempt of coming to grips with the reordering of class and politics in postindustrial societies. That problematic is shared by a second tradition drawn on here, Bourdieusian research on new forms of “classed politics” (Jarness, Flemmen, and Rosenlund 2019). Both approaches see a continued salience of social structure in postindustrial ideological alignments, which they identify with similar, multi-dimensional understandings of class. Further, both approaches focalize the mediating position of social identities between social structure and political alignments (Bornschier et al. 2021). In a two-step empirical study, neo-Bourdieusian and cleavage approaches are brought into conversation on two levels. The first is the spatial reconstruction of correspondences between social structure and ideological polarities. This forms the object of the first part of the analysis, which develops a geometrical reconstruction of the German sociopolitical space, analyzing data from the 2018 General Population Survey ALLBUS, using the technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The goal is a holistic reconstruction of the contemporary linkages between social structure and ideological divides, or what I call the class-political constellation. This reconstruction also serves to interrogate the idea of a rift sorting classes and class fractions into opposing ideological camps. Results confirm that the German political space is “classed”, with considerable correspondences between ideological positionings and social positions. A cartwheel-shaped constellation of four divides – between redistribution and property, universalism and particularism, left and right, and anti-populist ‘high’ and populist ‘low’ politics – structures the German political space. This constellation corresponds to vertical and horizontal social divides based on the volume and composition of capitals. Issues of universalism-particularism form a central divide that separates workers and sociocultural professionals, among other groups, confirming findings of the new cleavage literature. Putting this framework in dialogue with Bourdieusian political sociology, the MCA also reveals that the class-political constellation does not take the form of Manichaean political camps, but that of a gradational space. Instead of coherent and polarized camps, cleavage poles describe loose clusters connected by family resemblances. Coherent universalists and particularists are minorities, the majority stands in between. Overall, the polarization of the space is limited and there is an ideological center encompassing positions on which very large majorities concur. Sociopolitical divides that are salient are multidimensional and do not align on a single line of conflict. Further, the political space is not only structured by differences in political opinions but also by degrees of exclusion from politics altogether, with lower strata, particularly workers, on the excluded side. This first step of the analysis paints a nuanced picture that refutes central assumptions of ‘cultural class conflict’ discourses, while upholding the centrality of class and inequality for political and ideological alignments. It also sets the stage for the second, more extensive part of the study, which centers on classed forms of social identity. In cleavage theory, speaking of a full-blown cleavage requires not only the coincidence of social bases and voting tendencies, but also the formation of distinct group identities and modes of normative integration. This sociocultural or identity level of cleavages has largely been neglected in past cleavage scholarship or treated in a reductionist way. The second part of the study aims at this gap, and digs into the pre-political realm of identification and social morality, below and beyond the sphere of party competition. It asks whether and how the divide of universalism-particularism rests on deeper pre-political bases of classed identification, zooming in on the class fractions most distant on the universalism-particularism divide in the quantative analysis: production workers and middle class sociocultural professionals. Theoretically, this part draws on Bourdieusian cultural class analysis (Savage 2012). It unpacks the elusive concept of identity into three more specific relational components (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). These are a) self-understandings embedded in a sense of social location, expressed relationally through symbolic boundaries; b) moral boundaries and moral economies; and c) relations to politics, i.e. what “politics” is to people and how it relates to who they are. Against intellectualist understandings of public opinion, this approach highlights the non-ideological and pre-reflexive articulation of positionings through embodied, intuitive schemes of categorization which Bourdieu calls habitus. The basic idea is that the regularities of political positionings among ordinary, i.e. non-expert citizens generally do not spring from coherent ideological orientations regarding political conflict, but from basic practical schemes and modes of thought embedded in wider forms of life. Empirically, this part draws on 50 in-depth interviews with Millenial cohort production workers and sociocultural professionals in Germany. Interviews centered on self-understandings, asking respondents to describe “the type of person you are”. The line of questioning was deliberately kept open, leaving the respondents a lot of space to focalize elements of their self-understanding they wanted to highlight. Cleavage-related issues, and political positionings overall, were deliberately not prompted, leaving open whether they were salient or not. Similarly, the analysis of the interviews, based on techniques of the Documentary Method, reconstructed classed forms of social self-location, morality, and relations to politics in a holistic way, and only then asked for the role that cleavage-related identification played in them. The results of this second step of the analysis are in-depth portraits of six diverse clusters of sociomoral identities and relations to politics found in the two class fractions. Workers clusters include rural, status quo- and respectability-oriented Working Class Conservatives; Social Populists negotiating a perceived loss of status as manual workers by sharp boundary drawing against both those above and those below; individualized Pragmatic Privatists living by a creed of ‘live and let live’; as well as Alternative Workers whose activism leads them to a disidentication from the working class. Among the sociocultural professionals sample, a cluster of caring, recognition-focused Social Therapists is distinguished from an expertise-centered and socially distinctive cluster of High Liberals. Each of these clusters stands for common entanglements of social location, identity, and morality, entanglements that are also reflected in specific relations to politics and political positionings. What emerges is a panorama of diverse social identities within the two classes, directly mirroring findings of the quantative analysis. The core of each of the social identity clusters is situated in a specific moral project. These are captured e.g. as the pursuit of embeddedness among Working Class Conservatives, of deservingness among Social Populists, of autonomy among Pragmatic Privatists, of solidarity among Alternative Workers; flourishing among Social Therapists, and expertise among High Liberals. Each moral project is anchored in a specific sense of social location which respondents seek to revaluate. Doing so, they each draw on a specific set of identity categories, demarcations from specific others, distinct forms of occupational and gendered ethos, as well as invocations of implicit social contracts inscribed in the wider moral economy. These pre-political constellations furnish the central categories also for political positionings, and thus mediate between social structure and political ideology. In this way, the study paints a rich picture of social identity processes among two classes central for recent debates of realignment. It is shown that the coherent, ideological, conflictual, and dualistic picture of cleavage conflict does not describe the vernacular in which most people develop their views in everyday life. Instead, the politics of ordinary people is an appendix of pre-political moral projects situated in social structure. To understand the pre-political realm, we need a different vocabulary than that suggested by diagnoses of ideological conflict and ‘culture wars’. Yet, there are specific instances and dynamics by which pre-political identity constellations do provide openings for the formation of a new cleavage. These give important insights into potentials for future realignment. In this sense, the findings of this part of the study are two-fold. On the one hand, it identifies some crucial sites and dynamics by which classed social identities provide a “mobilization potential” for a deeper politicization of the universalism-particularism divide. But at the same time, it shows that as a diagnosis of an existing state of social division, the geological imaginary of a new cleavage rift running through all of the social sphere is misleading. While discourses about a ‘new cultural class conflict’ are thus rejected, the diagnosis of a new cleavage is confirmed as a description of the structural underpinnings of an important pattern of partisan alignment and, to some degree, partisan identification. The diagnosis is shown to be much less accurate in the realm of pre-political identities, where a new cleavage only exists as a set of more or less diffuse potentials. Is German society ripped into antagonistic halves or thirds by the cultural conflict of a high education, frequent-flying universalist new middle class looking down on a rooted and traditional particularist working class which resents them? The answer this study gives is: no, not really. But political actors who want to make such a conflict reality could draw on a range of distinct potentials and openings.

The doctoral thesis was created by the will to develop and analyse the work experience of about 20 years as a social worker in the third sector in the ministerial projects of "Protection and Emergence of the victims of trafficking and smuggling and sexual exploitation, working, begging and illegal trade in organs ", then intertwined - with the now known ENA / Emergency North Africa - in the coordination of CAS Reception Structures (Extraordinary Reception Centers headed by the Prefectures) and Sprar (Protection System for Asylum Seekers and Refugees to the Ministry of the Interior today SIPROIMI) for foreign minors and adults. During these years of experience in the field I have come into direct contact with the "inhabitants" of these "places" observing roles and structures, imposed, arbitrary, static and changeable on which I have had to act myself resistance practices in order not to get stuck in the countless "revolving doors" that the "Trafficking and Asylum System" imposes and disposes. I then started by identifying the context - the liberal system - where the knowledge and powers - of the deputy hospitalising deputies for immigrants - have undisturbed the laws of governmentality behaviour of individuals who live - be they social workers, asylum seekers and refugees and victims of trafficking. In this path I have been able to experience both as a social worker and as a researcher and also as a solidarity as these devices are «machines producing discourses and knowledge, protocols, practices, structures and regimes of truth that (re) inevitably and intentionally form the subjectivities that are involved»Foucault, 2004). In conclusion I will try to show how the relocation (of work, migrants, services, etc.), the introduction of foreign labor capable of creating "useful reserve armies" (Sassen, 2015) with which to blackmail the indigenous labor force (exploited and exploitable due to precarious legal, housing, health and human conditions) and the privatization of every aspect of collective life (such as health, transport networks - a dear subject having experienced the collapse of Ponte Morandi) have contributed to severing the relationship with territory destroying any bond that is not of a mercantile and / or economic type.

Questa ricerca mira a mostrare il potenziale euristico dello ‘spazio sociale’ nell’ambito degli studi su movimenti sociali con l’utilizzo delle categorie analitiche di ‘identity of place’ (identità del luogo) e di ‘place-based identities’ (identità legate al luogo) per un’analisi comparativa dei movimenti antagonisti nella città di Verona, che promuovono costruzioni concorrenti di cittadinanza urbana (appartenenza quotidiana alla città). Mentre la città di Verona viene riconosciuta come la fortezza dell’estrema destra nella penisola italiana e ‘città modello’ per la rete transnazionale degli attori identitari, essa dimostra di possedere anche delle potenzialità per movimenti dal basso che lavorano per la realizzazione di un’appartenenza inclusiva e pluralistica nella vita quotidiana della città. L’analisi basata su 3 anni di ricerca sul campo svolta con metodi dell’osservazione partecipante, etnografia online, interviste approfondite, ricerca d’archivio e metodi visuali; e mostra come l’identità collettiva e l’azione collettiva degli attori sociali sono influenzate dal loro rapporto con lo spazio in cui operano. Da un lato, un’alleanza dei identitarismo sovranista è unita intorno a un’identità territoriale escludente che si incarna nell’introspettivo paesaggio turistico del centro storico, e dall’altro, un ‘assemblage’ di gruppi progressisti autonominatesi ‘gli anticorpi dell’odio’ si è formato attraverso l’identità territoriale espansiva che ha contribuito a realizzare nel estroversivo interculturale quartiere di Veronetta. Questi attori sono autori di continue lotte quotidiane negli spazi urbani condivisi attraverso pratiche di territorializzazione, ‘placemaking’ trasformativo, e rappresentazioni alternative dello spazio che non solo funzionano a inscrivere la loro visione della cittadinanza urbana (city-zenship) su tale spazio, segnando così i confini cognitivi di inclusione e esclusione, ma volgono anche alla connessione con lotte simili in contesti diversi.
This study is an attempt to show the heuristic potential of social space in the field of social movement studies with the utilization of the analytical categories ‘identity of place’ and ‘place-based identities’ for a comparative analysis of antagonistic movements in the city of Verona, promoting competing constructions of city-zenship (belonging and everyday membership to the city). While the city of Verona has come to the fore as the fortress of the far-right in the Italian peninsula and a model city for the transnational network of identitarian actors, it also demonstrates grassroots potentials for the realization of an inclusive and pluralist belonging in the everyday city life. The analysis premised on 3 years of fieldwork that included participant observation, online ethnography, in-depth interviews, archival research, and visual methods, demonstrates the ways in which collective identity and collective action of social actors are shaped by their relationship to the space in which they operate. On the one hand, an alliance of sovereignist identitarianism is united in an exclusionary territorial identity that is embodied in the inward-looking touristscape of the historical center, and on the other hand, an assemblage of progressive groups referred to as the ‘antibodies of hate’ is formed through the expansive place-based identity that they have helped establish in the outward-looking neighborhood of Veronetta. These actors author everyday struggles in shared urban spaces through practices of territorialization, transformative placemaking, and alternative representations of space that not only work to inscribe their vision of city-zenship upon such space, thereby marking cognitive boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, but also connect them with similar struggles in different settings.

The thesis analyses the phenomenon of trafficking and the system of exploitation of prostitution involving Nigerian women in three distinct Italian contexts: Milan, Naples, and the Domizio coastal area (in the Campania region). The study examines the role played by the religious dimension in determining or not conditions of vulnerability. To this end, we tried to understand both the functions covered by the traditional rites, known as “juju rites”, practiced on women on behalf of the criminal organization by local priests (the native doctors), and the roles played by the pastors of the Nigerian Pentecostal churches present in many Italian cities. Gender is the second dimension of analysis taken into consideration, in relation to the criminal markets involved and their management, the determination or not of conditions of subordination-exploitation and the ability to emerge and recognize the status of "victim of trafficking” by the institutions responsible for combating the phenomenon and protecting the actors (women but also men) directly involved. The basic hypothesis that drives the research is that it is not possible to understand the criminal phenomenon of the Nigerian trafficking and, more generally, the female-dominated criminal system that coordinates its management, if we do not try to understand (as far as possible) the religious dimension, that is the spiritual world on which most Nigerians seem to base their choices, whether they are inserted in a criminal or completely legitimate context.

The word laicité, translated as "laicity", has a growing importance in national and international public, political and scientific debates. In recent decades, in Italy the "question of laicity" has gained a huge attention both in the public and in the political sphere. The first part of the thesis is a literature review aimed at reviewing the history of this concept and its meanings, both in Italy and France. Historically, laicity has its roots in the istitutional separation between State and Church, and in the idea of a State neutrality towards religion(s). Nowadays, it has lost its specificity and refers to more general concepts such as toleration or democracy. Religious traditions, on the one side, and States, on the other, are changing and the concept of laicity too, as a consequence. The second part of the thesis is a case study, based on 1680 newspaper articles. The analysis aims at identifing the frames of laicity expressed by politicians, and the main concept associated to laicity, both through qualitative and quantitative analisys. The content analysis is based on T-Lab software; the frame analysis on Atlas.ti. The main theoretical result is a grid for the analysis of laicity frames in pthe public and political sphere. The main empirical results show: the connection between laicity and democracy in the contemporary Italian debates; that the frames activation is influenced by the topic and by the political context; that frames of laicity are very different in the same coalition and also in the same political party.

There is a long-lasting debate on reasons and causes of social movement participation. Scholars suggest different explanations from the perspective of one or another theory. However, the theoretical and empirical fact is that there is a dearth of sociological literature on systematic, integrated approach covering multiple factors from different levels of movement participation. To address this problem and contribute to the comprehensive multifactored Model, the objective of this paper is to develop a Model of movement participation, which is based on theoretical and empirical analysis. In the framework of this paper a Model of movement participation is developed which further is tested in Georgian social protests in a particular period. In this way the generated and further developed Model is not only analyzed in context of the corresponding literature but also examined in a practical setting. Due to novelty of the study, qualitative approach has been applied. Overall, research proved theoretical and empirical application of the Model(s). The study is an important contribution to the sociological literature on social movements.

Ideas which adults hold about children and child poverty are important contributors to the well-being or ill-being of children, and knowledge about the social constructions of childhood and child poverty are important for addressing overall poverty in developing countries. However, child poverty studies premised on the representations of children and child poverty are very limited. Hence, this research explored representations of children/childhood and child poverty in rural communities in Northern Ghana. The research adopted a qualitative approach, using the agency/structure debate as a theoretical framework for interview analysis. The study was carried out in 4 rural communities in northern Ghana with 2 in the Lawra district of the Upper West and 2 in the West Mamprusi district of the Northern. Both primary and secondary materials were collected. The former were generated from purposively selected household members (both adults and children) and institutional level representatives, and the later gathered from selected institutions. An interview guide and a focus group guide were constructed and used as the main instruments for data collection. The study involved 123 participants from the community level including 55 children, 48 adults and 20 older persons and 18 participants from the institutional level. We explored the normative representations of children (what children should be and behave) and children “in practice” (what they actually are and do in the narratives of the research participants), and we classified them according to different analytical dimensions identified in the research. We also pointed out and analysed the differences in representations of children according to child’s gender and among the different generations of adults. Findings from the research confirm that children’s representations have relevant impact on their poverty status. The implication is that, to address children poverty, policy actions need to give attention to social representations of children and to the specificity of child poverty in the local context.

This study investigates the following questions: How do microcredit programs contribute to the formation of social capital, poverty alleviation, and empowerment of women in market rationality? What particular kinds of norms and values do microcredit programs nurture through the operation and management of credit? How do microcredit programs maximize the recovery of loans from the poor clients? How and under what contexts do rural women get involved in microcredit programs, and how do they negotiate the changes to traditions and values in coping with these interventions? Following the ethnographic research approach, this study explores these fundamental questions by employing in-depth interviews, case studies, and direct observations as data collection tools. The Foucaultian notions of disciplinary technologies (Foucault, 1977a) and governmentality (1991) have been applied as a theoretical framework to analyze the policies and strategies of microcredit programs of Grameen Bank and BRAC—two leading NGOs in Bangladesh—against the background of neoliberalism. This study reveals that Grameen Bank and BRAC offer credit by getting poor client women to form self-selected groups, which is a governmental strategy to reduce the transaction cost. Moreover, microcredit programs have reinforced the existing social relationships and utilized the social capital generated by the poor women themselves in order to check the moral hazards of the clients. The loan delivery and operational mechanism appears to have reinforced the existing social inequality along class and gendered lines rather than bridging the gap through the productive management of credit. It is also evident that microcredit programs have disciplined poor clients through the imposition of stringent rules and regulations, which subordinate them to the NGO mandates – in which processes groups, deposit books, and permanent residents act as surveillance for the timely repayment of loan from the poor clients. It also indicates that discipline is more effective on women than men, given the social and cultural contexts of the poor women in rural Bangladesh. Microcredit has even reached untapped rural areas, where NGOs have come to compete between themselves with their ‘home service’ loan, hoping to cash-in on the poverty of poor women. Thus, the commercialization of microcredit programs reflects the stark reality of the social context in rural Bangladesh due to longstanding poverty and a lack of organizations offering financial services to the poor without the so-called collateral free concept. As a result, the commercial nature of the programs has failed to function as an effective empowering mechanism for women, and has also failed to challenge the patriarchal social structure. Furthermore, microcredit programs appear to have no significant effect in elevating women’s social, economic and political agency to a level that could be effective for improving the intra-household gender relations and raising their status in the community and in broader society. Rather, the conjugal bliss has turned into conflicting relations due to repayment pressure. Moreover, most of the women belonging to different income groups are found to have not used credit money in productive activities. Therefore, misallocation of credit appears to have been detrimental to the alleviation of poverty of the clients. The only positive effects have been found in the smoothing of consumption for some groups in the upper- and middle- income poor. Credit is found to have been effective in addition to the existing asset base as well as investing credit in income generation projects. It is therefore debt-burden and risk that binds the clients into a vicious loan-and-repayment cycle rather than alleviating their poverty. However, microcredit has been a political strategy of neoliberal governmentality that subordinates poor women into NGO discipline and fosters the global agenda of neoliberalism at the grassroots level in Bangladesh by ensnaring poor women into formal credit practices through their entry into financial market.

Can irregular migrants be citizens? Irregular migrants are usually not seen as members of the political community in the land of arrival, let alone as citizens. In practice, however, their irregular status does not preclude them from becoming part of a community. Irregular migrants live, work and participate in society, construct a variety of relations with citizens, and even engage in forms of political action. If we broaden our understanding of citizenship and then look at this empirically, the situation of irregular migrants reveals how many aspects of citizenship can also be attained in the absence of formal recognition or citizenship. This ethnographic study examines two social movements of irregular migrants and their struggle for citizenship, in Amsterdam and in Turin, respectively. The research project shows how irregular migrants construct citizenship from below, in the absence of formal recognition from above. These empirical findings are the basis for a reflection on the debate in critical citizenship studies. Yet, instead of focusing on the outright political actions of irregular migrants, it analyses claims to citizenship from the perspective of the everyday. By so doing we see how the prevailing notions of citizenship of irregular migrants in critical citizenship studies present both an overly optimistic and an over-politicised image of their citizenship struggle. This limits the understanding of the claims to citizenship of irregular migrants, as it does not account for their deep desire to not be political. This study makes irregular migrants’ desire for a normal life apparent and argues for the importance of examining this construction of normality, to look at the ‘life of a citizen’, the (normal) life which citizenship enables.

Questa tesi di dottorato affronta e approfondisce tre temi diversi ma legati tra loro: le performance accademiche degli studenti nell'istruzione terziaria, l'uso del tempo e l'utilizzo dei Big Data nelle scienze sociali. Gli obiettivi che hanno fatto nascere questo lavoro, attraverso un approccio a tratti interdisciplinare, sono stati, in primo luogo, cercare di colmare empiricamente alcune lacune legate a interrogativi di ricerca rimasti parzialmente senza risposta in letteratura e, in secondo luogo, proporre soluzioni metodologiche connesse soprattutto alla raccolta dei dati e alla loro affidabilità nel rispondere a questi interrogativi in un modo quanto più possibile coerente con la realtà . La tesi non ha una struttura monografica in quanto i quattro capitoli empirici hanno una struttura propria. Il primo capitolo empirico vuole essere un inquadramento generale dell'intera tesi che mira a indagare l'effetto del capitale culturale familiare sia sulle performance accademiche degli studenti, sia su alcuni aspetti legati alla gestione che essi fanno del proprio tempo che, tradizionalmente, sono associati a una buona riuscita accademica, ipotizzando che l'origine sociale non esaurisca il suo effetto nei livelli d'istruzione precedenti. I modelli di equazione strutturali, attraverso l'analisi multi-gruppo, hanno consentito di costruire l'analisi in un'ottica comparativa rispetto al settore disciplinare di appartenenza. Il secondo capitolo approfondisce la dimensione temporale, ovvero come gli studenti organizzano le attività durante le loro giornate, al fine di comprendere come essa possa influire sui risultati universitari. L'obiettivo principale è stato colmare alcune lacune empiriche presenti in letteratura che mostrano risultati contrastanti su questo tema, dettati soprattutto da problemi di raccolta dati, non sempre adatti a indagare l'uso che gli studenti fanno del proprio tempo. Anche questo capitolo propone uno sguardo comparativo, confrontando degli studenti del primo anno, cioè gli studenti più a rischio€ rispetto al gestire il proprio tempo in modo poco efficace, con gli studenti degli anni successivi. Il terzo capitolo descrive il progetto SmartUnitn, fulcro di questo lavoro di tesi al fine di evidenziare come l'utilizzo di ICTs è €“in questo caso gli smartphone€“ nella fase di raccolta dati possa contribuire a migliorare la qualità del dato ottenuto andando a risolvere alcune questioni problematiche derivanti dagli strumenti tradizionali utilizzati dagli scienziati sociali. Il quarto e ultimo capitolo, propone un caso concreto di utilizzo dei dati ottenuti dall'esperimento SmartUnitn, proponendo un metodo che, grazie all'unione dei dati dei sensori e i dati delle risposte degli studenti, possa colmare alcune lacune presenti in letteratura sul tema dell'influenza dell'utilizzo dei social media sui risultati universitari.

La ricerca mira a ricostruire la definizione della situazione politica che alcuni elettori italiani hanno prodotto per maturare la propria scelta di voto in occasione delle Elezioni Europee del 2014. Per poter agire infatti, gli individui hanno prima bisogno di comprendere la situazione nella quale agiscono. I risultati mostrano che, a seguito dei cambiamenti avvenuti nel panorama politico italiano l'anno precedente, elettori, partiti e leader si sono mossi a velocità diverse, faticando nel condividere una medesima definizione. Rilevare questa situazione di disallineamento aiuta a comprendere, in generale, gli effetti della valence politics sul voto e, nello specifico, il percorso politico dei partiti italiani.

La mia tesi di dottorato si presenta come un lavoro di ricerca empirica che ha messo a fuoco la questione della sicurezza organizzativa quale pratica situata, vale a dire non come mera “assenza di errori†, ma piuttosto come capacità emergente di un contesto organizzativo di funzionare in maniera affidabile, ri-configurando le attività degli attori organizzativi quando si verifica un breakdown. Riferimento empirico della tesi è la sala operatoria, dove la sicurezza di pazienti ed operatori costituisce un elemento inscindibile dalle pratiche lavorative e dalle dinamiche organizzative, dove socialità e materialità risultano intrecciate grazie all’elevata densità tecnologica dell’ambiente operatorio e dove l’interprofessionalità contraddistingue il lavoro d’équipe. Attraverso l’etnografia organizzativa e lo shadowing all’interno dei blocchi operatori di due ospedali italiani, ho indagato quali sono le dinamiche organizzative e lavorative che permettono agli attori organizzativi di performare pratiche mediche sicure, nonché la maniera in cui le diverse dinamiche che entrano in gioco nel corso delle attività quotidiane in sala operatoria favoriscono/ostacolano la creazione e la stabilizzazione della sicurezza. Nella prima parte della tesi ho illustrato il framework teorico e metodologico, mentre nella seconda viene illustrata l’analisi della ricerca condotta. Ciò che è emerso dall’analisi del materiale empirico è che la sicurezza operatoria si costruisce a partire dall’allineamento di tre dinamiche organizzative, quali: processi tecnologici, competenze esperte e conoscenze sensibili, dinamiche comunicative Ciascuna di queste dinamiche fornisce stabilità alle pratiche mediche che hanno luogo in sala ed alla sicurezza operatoria grazie alla maniera in cui si allinea alle altre. Rispetto dunque agli studi sino ad oggi realizzati sul tema, il mio lavoro vuole fornire spunti di riflessione per guardare alla sicurezza come pratica che prende forma a partire non più dal modo in cui una singola dinamica organizzativa consente o ostacola la realizzazione delle attività in sala (in maniera esente da rischi o pericoli potenziali), ma dal modo in cui ciascuna dinamica si aggancia e si allinea alle altre. In tal senso, la sicurezza organizzativa può essere letta ed analizzata quale pratica e network sociomateriale. Nello studio della sicurezza organizzativa, la comprensione e l’analisi della “natura†dei legami tra gli elementi del network permette anche di andare oltre la separazione (spesso forzata) tra gli studi di stampo clinico e manageriale e la letteratura di matrice sociologica: poiché entrambe le letterature sono oggi giunte all’individuazione di alcune dinamiche chiave (in buona parte coincidenti) nella creazione e stabilizzazione della sicurezza organizzativa, potrebbe risultare interessante integrare i risultati prodotti da ricerche condotte da prospettive differenti.

The research assesses the social impact of introducing automated electoral procedures. Starting with an overview of the current debate in the Italian and in the international arena, it considers the viewpoint of different stakeholders: bureaucrats, politicians, civil society, pressure groups and the market within four case studies (Estonia, Ireland, Great Britain and the Netherlands) to highlight the direct and unexpected consequences of changing a long established habit in such a delicate matter as voting. It also draws data from the largest Italian experimentation of electronic voting in a supervised environment – held in the Autonomous Province of Trento between 2004 and 2009 – to report on the attitudes and on the actual behaviour of electors facing the electronic option. The deployment of multivariate regression models on survey data supports the hypothesis of existing divides between those who are favourable to automation in elections and those who are not, the main cleavages being age and education. Furthermore, a greater degree of trust in the generalised other is needed in e-voting but not perceived in i-voting, while both voting procedures appeal those who are already politically mobilized but less attached to traditions. A greater level of techno-determinism is also related to the propensity of accepting automated procedures. Evidence about the practice of e-voting during the experimentation – gathered by means of an innovative method labelled as parallel ethnography – shows that during the field trial unforeseeable threats occurred to the constitutional requirements of personality, equality and secrecy. This hiatus between instructions and instructed actions calls not only for a more thorough training of electronic scrutinizers but also for a better design of the machine’s interface and for an adequate legal framework, should e-voting become legally binding.

The process of European integration forces the scientific community to reflect on the importance of the national level as the appropriate one for the analyses of social inequalities. Especially among the studies on poverty and deprivation there is growing concern about the choice of the proper geographical reference. Indeed, within the research on poverty, beside the ‘traditional’ approach based on a national poverty line other studies rely on different geographical thresholds, either supra-national (the pan-european approach) or sub-national (the regional approach). I aimed to add to this debate an additional level of investigation, centred on the theoretical relevance of trans-national clusters of European regions that is cluster of regions that could belong to different nation-states but that nonetheless show more economic, social and institutional similarities than those existing among different ‘areas’ belonging to the same nation-state. In order to analyse the micro and macro determinants of poverty, I organized this thesis balancing both theoretical and methodological aspects. The first chapter reviews the most important literature on social inequality, distinguishing between the micro-level perspective (i.e. individualization theory versus cumulative risks theory) and, the macro-level one emphasizing, above all, the institutional rules in shaping social inequalities underlined by the political economy, the economic sociology, the urban sociology and the economic theories. In the second chapter I overviewed, discussed and problematized the several conceptualizations, operationalisations and measurations of poverty, therefore it represents a theoretical and methodological contribution at the contemporary debate on poverty as well as an important starting point for the analysis presented in the three empirical chapters. From a methodological point of view, on the one hand I used complex statistics techniques (the multiple imputation methods) to create an high-quality database for the analysis of poverty by a multidimensional, longitudinal and regional-comparative perspective. On the other one, this thesis is valuable for using cutting edge techniques in the area of poverty and social exclusion. More specifically, in the first two empirical chapters (Ch. 3 and 4) I specified several multilevel models (random intercept and random slope too) in order to disentangle the household and individual level determinants of poverty from the macro-level ones, and also to describe which of the macro-institutional perspective (national, European, regional or trans-national) is the most useful in describing e predicting the distribution of poverty within the European regions analysed. While in the last empirical chapter (Ch. 5) I specified an econometric panel model to specifically analyse the true state dependence in poverty; so doing I focused also at the social exclusion phenomena. Furthermore, every model presented in the three empirical chapters has been specified using several operationalization of poverty (that is, using the national, European, regional and trans-national poverty lines). The main conclusions of this thesis are linked with the validity and reliability of the relative poverty measure and the institutional concepts of welfare-states, economic regions and trans-national clusters. First of all, it seems that the relative measure of poverty is a good one to predict and describe the phenomena. Indeed, the micro-determinant of poverty are not affected by the poverty line (national, European, regional or trans-national) used in the models proposed. Obviously the number of people at risk of poverty are affected by such definitions, but the relative structure of relation among the individual and household determinant are not. Secondly, it seems that the macro-determinant of poverty are affected by the poverty line definition and, above all, the variation produced on the country-variables effect is not coherent with the welfare state interpretation of poverty and social exclusion. On the contrary, the regional and the trans-national perspectives effects are more stable regardless the poverty line adopted, and they help to capture the most part of the regional variance among the European regions analysed. Furthermore, I pointed out the interaction effect between the individual characteristics linked to labour market position (i.e. unemployed status) and the regional framework: the random slope models show the significant impact of the regional context in shaping the social exclusion experience. Finally, it is important that these results are coherent with both multilevel and panel models.

L’étude du harcèlement systématique entre pairs à l’école (school bullying) est-il éclairé par l’approfondissement de la relation aux normes qu’entretiennent les jeunes acteurs ? Quels sont les éléments clé aidant l’identification et la compréhension du phénomène ? A partir d’une redéfinition du bullying insistant sur les apports croisés de chaque protagoniste sur la scène des dynamiques indésirables, le travail propose une étude située du problème. Chaque acte et chaque initiative de type bullying sont ainsi analysés dans le cadre de la situation spécifique qu’ils dessinent et dont ils relèvent à la fois. Pour cela, l’attention est portée sur les attributions de sens et sur la perception réciproque d’adhésions normatives mises en avant par les élèves concernés. Quatre classes scolaires italiennes sont analysées dans leurs dynamiques relationnelles et conflictuelles ; du point de vue de leur organisation, de l’ordre et de la discipline ; en termes d’investissements axiologiques opérés par les jeunes et leur entourage et encouragés par les enseignants. [English Abstract] School bullying: does the study of peer harassment in schools delve deeper into the relationships of young people with rules and values? What are the key factors that can help to better identify and understand the phenomenon ? The work starts from a re-definition of school bullying based on the cross contribution of each character acting in the educational scene where the undesirable dynamics take place to propose a local analysis of the problem. Each school bullying initiative is analysed in the context of the specific situation that it create and from which it raises. Attention is also brought to the attribution of meanings as well as to the reciprocal perception of the compliance with the rules by students. Four Italian classrooms are examined taking into account the dynamics of their relationships and conflicts; their organization, rules and discipline; the axiological investments made by young people and promoted by their teachers.

The aim of this research is to analyse the educational gap between native and foreign students in Europe. In last decades, because of the increasing number of immigrants, the sociological literature on the ethnic stratification in education has considerably grown. However, several aspects of the relationship between ethnicity and educational inequality are still under debate. This research is based on the assumption that the gross educational disadvantage of foreign students is due to differences in both achievements and educational choices. I analyse the several dimensions that scholars have identified as being able to influence one of them, or both. The roles played by individual characteristics –micro-level– (such as: social class, cultural background, gender, ethnicity and migration background), by the school context –meso-level– (i.e. peers group, teachers, and the school) and by the institutional context –macro-level– (the educational system and the country’s migration history) will be analytically divided. As different European nations have historically attracted migrants from specific countries in specific periods, individual’s ethnicity has long coincided with his immigration generation. Nowadays, because of the growing number of nationalities present in each country, it is finally possible to separate these two dimensions. Thus, I add to the debate in that I analyse whether ethnicity and migration background influence the individual educational success independently one another and independently of social origins. Moreover, I address whether the relationship between ethnicity and educational inequality is due to primary or secondary effects. In other words, I investigate if ethnicity and migration background influence only academic competences – which than translate in better choices – or if they are also able to directly affect the latter, net of individuals academic skills.

This doctoral thesis is about the study of the social capital, its effects on the local development and on the socio-economic resilience of the Palestinians trapped in the East Jerusalem's al-'Eizariyah area. The transformation of al-'Eizariyah since 2002 through the Israeli encroachment on Palestinian land by instrumental use of the Separation Wall policies was analysed and re-state through the lenses of the sociological theory and concepts. Based on the accounts of life stories and interviews with various members of the al-'Eizariyah's former and present community and through the visual data of the changes in al-'Eizariyah and the areas adjacent to the Separation Wall a study of the Palestinian coping and survival strategies was undertaken. The thesis demonstrates how the reality of al-'Eizariyah was changed dramatically in the last two decades despite and in the opposite direction of the Oslo Accords of 1993. To be sure, al-‘Eizariyah, which is located two miles east of Jerusalem, had expanded to adjust to the economic boom of the early post-Oslo years coupled with the political expectations of it being part of the future Palestinian capital. This was disrupted by the failure of the Oslo Accords, and the construction of the Israeli Separation Wall in 2002, which served as an instrument of intimidation and harassment to make Palestinians leave Jerusalem, as this thesis demonstrates. The Wall did not only cut off al-'Eizariyah from the main road that used to connect East Jerusalem to Jericho. The Wall's more sinister and long-term damage has been in the physical and psychological isolation of al-‘Eizariyah and in preventing its residents from being fully integrated in the economic, social, cultural, and political life of the East Jerusalem and of the West Bank. This two-sided effect of the Separation Wall started when most of the people who used to work in East Jerusalem and Israel lost their Jobs, students could no longer study in Jerusalem and had to change schools; the sick no longer could use the healthcare facilities, etc. Former residents of al-'Eizariyah could no longer do any of these basic necessities neither their shopping and entertainment in Jerusalem freely without being humiliated with denial of access to Jerusalem based on the persons' ability to present a Blue ID at the checkpoint, the only ID that is recognized by the Israeli regime. While some social capital forms helped in coping with the difficulties caused by this new reality it was the difference in the pre- and post-Wall situations that were examined in order to understand the impact of the adversity represented by the Wall on the social capital of the Palestinians. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the implications of the construction of the Wall on the socio-economic life of al-‘Eizariyah residents and to study the Israel-Palestine conflict from sociological lens using a case study setting and qualitative analysis approach. This thesis demonstrates positive impact of the Wall on social capital types by where the bonding social capital became stronger yet the trend got reversed. At the community level, the challenges were too large to be handled only by bonding social capital. Therefore, there is a combined effort between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the local civil society associations and the private sector to overcome problems related to education, health care services, trade and labour in addition to social security caused by the Wall. It was found that bridging social capital and linking social capital were strongly present after the Wall was completed. Although civil society associations are strongly present in al-‘Eizariyah but because the Palestinian society is structured along patrimonial, familial, clannish, tribal and contradictory geographical cleavages, most of these associations work in a way that transformed the intended outcome of bridging social capital to some kind of bonding social capital as the beneficiaries and the participants are mostly from their family, clan members, or those who belong to the same political party, and not the community as a whole. However, observations and the empirical evidence show that bonding is stronger than bridging social capital. The social fragmentation caused by several social forces such as the local-stranger relationship, between the locals of al-‘Eizariyah and the displaced residents, prevented efficient cooperation in solving community problems. Lack of the sense of belonging is not only because the locals always express superiority over the displaced, but also because the displaced themselves do not want to lose their rooted original identity, especially the refugees who settled in the town after the 1948 war. This had a great overall impact on the unity of the Palestinian society especially that ‘the refugees’ communities constitute approximately 42 percent of the total population of the West Bank. The future challenge of the Palestinians in areas such as al-‘Eizariyah is to find ways of detecting de-fragmentation and manipulation policies and develop strategies that would prevent de-fragmentation of the Palestinians being orchestrated by the Israeli Wall policies and that only become apparent with a time lapse when it can be too late.

La ricerca si è occupata dei legami di solidarietà spontanea che si creano a partire dalle azioni volontarie messe in atto in una comunità territoriale. L’insieme di questi legami è stato considerato una risorsa sociale che ha la natura di bene pubblico ed che è in grado di favorire il benessere sociale di una società locale. Questa risorsa è stata concettualizzata attraverso la nozione di “capitale sociale solidale†e di essa si è tentato di comprenderne: 1) le specificità; 2) il suo processo di microfondazione; e infine 3) le sue implicazioni teoriche per una teoria dell’integrazione sociale. Il primo obiettivo è stato raggiunto mappando le azioni volontarie messe in atto nelle provincie di Trento e di Treviso. La mappa ha mostrato un quadro eterogeneo e diffuso di 119 azioni realizzate dalle principali categorie di attori della società locale. Per analizzare il processo di generazione di questa risorsa, le ragioni dei promotori sono state identificate grazie a 23 interviste biografiche. I risultati di queste interviste mostrano una pluralità di motivazioni che sostengono queste azioni e i limiti esplicativi della teoria della scelta razionale. Per quanto riguarda il terzo obiettivo, la riflessione ha cercato di chiarire la natura di bene pubblico del capitale sociale e l'utilità della nozione di capitale sociale solidale per i dibattiti sulla società civile e sulla coesione sociale. Da questo punto di vista, la ricerca ha messo in luce da una parte il contributo del capitale sociale solidale nella valorizzazione del legame sociale e, dall'altra, l'utilità della nozione nelle analisi della tradizione associativa interna al dibattito sulla società civile e nei modelli individualisti di tipo comunitario della coesione sociale. Infine, a partire dai risultati conseguiti vengono indicati tre percorsi di ricerca futuri da realizzarsi sia nel Nordest e sia nella regione francese Pays de la Loire.

La ricerca analizza una vicenda in cui si ipotizza in atto un fenomeno di erosione delle politiche del welfare state nel settore penale al fine di comprendere come reagiscono gli assistenti sociali e come definiscono la propria posizione professionale.

This study investigates what’s known as the world’s largest human migration from rural to urban areas. It examines both the destinations and the origins of the mobility trajectories of Chinese internal migrant workers which is somewhat neglected by current literature. Based on a multi-sited ethnography of the daily life of migrant workers in arrays of social setting (sheds in construction sites, urban villages, factories, restaurants) in their urban stay as well as the well-known left behind population in a rural village, the thesis explores the social and economic changes that this mass regional mobility brought to both rural and urban China. The implication of this work lies in a comprehensive and thorough examination on the regional rural-urban migration. It contributes to a dynamic assess, which deserves to study further, by providing an analysis on all the agents involved in the context of Chinese rural-urban migration: the left behind population in villages, the migrant workers and the urban citizens in cities.

This article examines the relationship between social cohesion and economic vulnerability in Europe. The analyses are build around two main research hypotheses. The first one argues the existence of a direct and negative association between economic inequality and social cohesion. The second supposition states that this connection is mediated by some factors which include the individuals’ position in the stratification system (i.e. social class). Finally, we believe that welfare state could be relevant because it influences both the relationship between social class and economic vulnerability and the link between social cohesion and economic vulnerability. The empirical analysis –based on the European Social Survey (ESS) carried out in 2003– shows the central role played by the welfare state and the existence of a direct and negative connection between social cohesion and economic vulnerability, only partially mediated by the effect of social class.

The new wave of global immigration to Europe has increased the urgency to discern which aspects of school context and of social interactions within the educational system need to be strengthened in order to create an environment where both immigrant and native students can perform at their best. Looking at educational ambitions allows studying educational performance, in order to estimate the gap between students of migrant backgrounds and natives, and to measure the social integration of immigrants’ children. My presentation aims to identify which resources and interactions within the school environment need to be strengthened with the purpose of improving educational expectations and aspirations of immigrants’ children and natives. First, I explore to what extent school resources, parental involvement in school and family environment shape educational expectations of migrants and natives in two European countries: Belgium and Italy. After delineating this international perspective, I deepen the analysis of the Italian case. I investigate to what extent the expectations and aspirations of the children of immigrants are influenced by the educational expectations of their native schoolmates using data on children of immigrants living in Italy and attending their final year of middle school (8th grade). In the final part of my presentation, I tackle the challenging issue of the impact of the presence of immigrants’ children on the educational aspirations of natives.

This thesis positions itself within the stream of research on self-tracking practices for the management of chronic illnesses. Self-care technologies, such as smartphones and many other mobile health devices, have led to the production of health data of patients outside institutional settings. This shift on the "personal" dimension of data has placed emphasis on self-knowledge practices supported by such technologies and on the concept of patient empowerment. Flanking a clinical trial conducted in north Italy aimed at quantifying the effectiveness and the acceptability of a self-tracking/remote-monitoring platform for type 1 and 2 diabetes patients, this work explores how a particular tool for self-tracking, the "personal experiment", fits in the process of knowledge of the patient with Type 2 Diabetes, exploring how the practice of learning to manage your own diabetes data is a complex activity that involves heterogeneous objects, actors and contexts. The leading research questions in this work were: (1) How do the knowing processes triggered by personal experiments involve patients’ with Type 2 Diabetes situated practices through their bodies, objects, technologies, contexts and relations? (2) How do personal experiments affect the empowerment and motivation of patients with Type 2 Diabetes to maintain a correct lifestyle? (3) How do personal experiments fit in the doctor-patient relationship, affecting existent educational practices and reconfiguring knowledge processes that involve patients with Type 2 Diabetes and their clinicians? By adopting a knowing in practice perspective and a subsequent qualitative research methodologies such as observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and co-design workshops, it was possible, firstly, to design a paper prototype of the digital personal experiment, “the notebook”; secondly, considering the notebook as a knowledge artefact allowed to explore the processes through which patients with Type 2 Diabetes learn to manage their disease, observing learning as a situated and emergent activity that involves first and foremost the patient's body, the objects and the power relationship with their clinicians.The main contributions of this thesis are on three different levels: first, analyzing self-knowledge of diabetes as a situated and emergent activity, it proposes to address the gap of studies on health literacy, which limit themselves to measuring what the patient learns as a result of the educational actions carried out by health professionals. Second, analyzing diabetes’ self-knowledge as a process that involves the practical knowledge and reconfigures power relationships between all actors involved, it aims to integrate studies on patient motivation and empowerment which conceive the doctor-patient reflections on patient’s data as a well-defined moment that follows a structured script. The ultimate goal of the thesis is to provide guidance to designers to develop digital personal experiments that are less standardized and more practice-based.

This thesis positions itself within the stream of research on self-tracking practices for the management of chronic illnesses. Self-care technologies, such as smartphones and many other mobile health devices, have led to the production of health data of patients outside institutional settings. This shift on the "personal" dimension of data has placed emphasis on self-knowledge practices supported by such technologies and on the concept of patient empowerment. Flanking a clinical trial conducted in north Italy aimed at quantifying the effectiveness and the acceptability of a self-tracking/remote-monitoring platform for type 1 and 2 diabetes patients, this work explores how a particular tool for self-tracking, the "personal experiment", fits in the process of knowledge of the patient with Type 2 Diabetes, exploring how the practice of learning to manage your own diabetes data is a complex activity that involves heterogeneous objects, actors and contexts. The leading research questions in this work were: (1) How do the knowing processes triggered by personal experiments involve patients’ with Type 2 Diabetes situated practices through their bodies, objects, technologies, contexts and relations? (2) How do personal experiments affect the empowerment and motivation of patients with Type 2 Diabetes to maintain a correct lifestyle? (3) How do personal experiments fit in the doctor-patient relationship, affecting existent educational practices and reconfiguring knowledge processes that involve patients with Type 2 Diabetes and their clinicians? By adopting a knowing in practice perspective and a subsequent qualitative research methodologies such as observation, semi-structured interviews, focus groups and co-design workshops, it was possible, firstly, to design a paper prototype of the digital personal experiment, “the notebook”; secondly, considering the notebook as a knowledge artefact allowed to explore the processes through which patients with Type 2 Diabetes learn to manage their disease, observing learning as a situated and emergent activity that involves first and foremost the patient's body, the objects and the power relationship with their clinicians. The main contributions of this thesis are on three different levels: first, analyzing self-knowledge of diabetes as a situated and emergent activity, it proposes to address the gap of studies on health literacy, which limit themselves to measuring what the patient learns as a result of the educational actions carried out by health professionals. Second, analyzing diabetes’ self-knowledge as a process that involves the practical knowledge and reconfigures power relationships between all actors involved, it aims to integrate studies on patient motivation and empowerment which conceive the doctor-patient reflections on patient’s data as a well-defined moment that follows a structured script. The ultimate goal of the thesis is to provide guidance to designers to develop digital personal experiments that are less standardized and more practice-based.

The role of social networks in creating and sustaining migration flows, as well as in the adjustment and settlement of migrants, has long been recognized in migration studies. However, cross-fertilization between migration research and network approaches is still uncommon. Utilizing a mixed-method network approach, this study contributes in furthering the understanding of how migrant networks operate. Migrant networks are conceptualized as embedded in dynamic and changing systems, and shown as evolving depending on various contexts and situations. Examined are ego-centric networks of the 134 respondents (58 in London and 76 in New York) in three migration phases: before coming to London or New York; initial period of adjustment; and the current network as a result of the subsequent process of settlement in the place of destination (in total, 402 network maps). In particular, compared are three different occupational groups – nurses, domestics, and care workers. Conceptually dividing the migration process in three phases provided the opportunity to study network dynamics and networking practices, albeit retrospectively. Eliciting migrant networks was embedded within in-depth interviews using both electronic and paper-based network visualization. The findings suggest contrasting network composition in two global cities and across the three occupational groups. In New York, familial ties play an almost exclusive role in facilitating and supporting the movement of Filipino migrants. In London, most of the research participants relied on former employers (in the case of domestic workers) or recruitment agencies (in the case of nurses and care workers in institutional facilities) to facilitate their move. These differences in pre-migration networks then shaped subsequent network formations, adjustments, and settlement experiences. Findings also illustrate that although networks have supportive influence on facilitation of the move and post-migration settlement, familial and co-ethnic ties can also be exploitative to the newly-arrived and undocumented migrants. Situating the particular cases in macro-level context, the study explores how the narratives of attaining the good life through overseas work are interconnected to the need and demand for care labor in the US and the UK as well as the Philippine state-led marketization of high-quality workers as an export commodity.

The aim of this dissertation is to assess if and how institutional features are likely to shape fields of study differentials in the overeducation risk. This issue is addressed with two different perspectives. First it is comparatively analysed how the differential incidence of overeducation among graduates from different fields of study is affected by labour market institutions. Then the effect of the university reform dictated by the guidelines of the Bologna Process on tertiary graduates’ risk of overeducation is evaluated. Italy is selected as a relevant case study for these analyses since, in comparison with other developed countries, it displays both low graduation rates and modest returns to tertiary education.

The study focuses on artists who adopt performance art as a form of creative expression within the world of contemporary visual art. Some performances are extreme exhibitions which often assume violent and aggressive forms; others are quasi-visible events like communication misunderstandings or reiterated behaviors which make the flow of ordinary interaction unusual and sometimes create a feeling of anxiety in the audience. There are of course basic differences between these kinds of performance; nevertheless, in the case of both the most spectacular events and «minimal performances», the artist acts at the borderline of what is explainable, and his/her artistic practices highlight the need to traverse the frontiers between traditional genres, mixing them up or forsaking them. A performance essentially consists in the creation of an interactive event, and artists manage the central elements of the interactive order: the dimension which, according to Erving Goffman, represents a reality in itself, possesses its own logic, and cannot be reduced either to macro-structural dimensions or to individual psychology. The topic of the research reported here can be summarized in the following question: how is it possible to turn a «social interaction» into an «artistic object»? The answer can be articulated on different dimensions: how a performance is projected, arranged and carried out; what happens during performance events; how such events can be recorded and conserved. A performance results from cooperation among a group of people which cannot be defined as a «system»: there are no formal roles, there are no fixed positions, there are no decisional centers. Nevertheless, the basic elements are in place for it to be possible to talk of the existence of an interactional unit: different social actors act together in an intentional, reiterated and settled manner. It is possible to find a great number of events which take place on specific sites and during which artists, venue managers, critics, collectors and performance audiences meet, work together, and share their interests. It is thus possible to use the term «sphere» to refer to a place to which admittance is granted only after an initiation process and rite of passage. In such «spheres» people follow careers based on internal, formal and informal hierarchical ladders. Moreover, there are subjects who act as gatekeepers, and myths and symbols are shared. The research was conducted in Northern Italy, where several towns were selected as central nodes in the Italian contemporary art field. I conducted in-depth interviews with subjects occupying the three main roles in the artistic field: artists, venue managers and curators, and art critics. The selection of the interviewees was based on their strategic position in the field. My purpose was to investigate the node that they occupied in the art world by combining two criteria: first, the spatial position of the environment in which they lived and worked (marginal, peripheral, central); second, the stage of their professional career (beginning, emerging, established).

This PhD thesis explores how policies in several receiving countries in Europe shape the labour market integration of humanitarian migrants. This research involved a systematic comparison across seven countries (The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway and Greece) in the period 1990 - 2008. Building on the integration framework of Ager and Strang (2008), I argue that integration is a multidimensional process that is influenced by both the individual characteristics of persons and the policy factors in the countries of reception. A combination of various policy instruments create an environment conditioning the behaviour of the integrating migrants, namely in granting or depriving legal rights, allowing more or less decision-making freedom with regards to employment or residence, and facilitating or hampering employment trajectories. A policy tool does not act in isolation, thus I deem it crucial to consider several policy areas at the same time. The following aspects are explored in this study: 1) access to a stable residence status and official labour market; 2) welfare benefit policies; 3) policies actively promoting labour market participation; 4) policies supporting language training. I show how different configurations of these policy conditions have led to different labour market integration outcomes among humanitarian migrants. Successful labour market integration is understood as equal labour market performance between humanitarian migrants and natives. This is operationalized by two indicators – difference in employment chances and difference in chances of having a good quality job. These parameters are measured through logistic regression analysis using the data of the European Labour Force Survey, Ad-hoc Module of 2008. The findings reveal that no country exhibited an outcome where humanitarian migrants are fully equal to natives in both parameters. However, Norway and Germany were found to be the countries where the differences between humanitarian migrants and natives were minimal. This outcome was labelled ‘balanced integration’. Using a technique of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), I compared the configurations of policies observed in the countries revealing balanced integration (Germany and Norway) with the remaining five countries. I found that having obligatory language and employability training programmes for humanitarian migrants was a crucial policy aspect, and the success of economic integration increases when such a policy is combined with generous welfare benefits and relatively easy and fast access to the official labour market.

Education continues to define social positions and reproduce social inequalities. Deficiencies in education may lead to disadvantages at both the individual and societal levels, and lower qualifications are usually obtained by already disadvantaged youths. One of the biggest problems in this regard is dropping out (also named early school-leaving)—i.e. young people who leave the education system before completing upper secondary school. Many interventions have attempted to prevent or discourage students from dropping out of school. Among them there are two straightforward systemic policies: raising the age of compulsory schooling and creating alternative tracks for completing education. They aimed to achieve the same goal—reducing dropping out—but using different strategies. Despite the diffusion of these reforms, it is not clear to what extent one or both may succeed in their goal. Both of these policies were actively pursued in Italy in a less than five-year period—from 1999 to 2003. In 1999, the so-called Berlinguer reform extended compulsory schooling from age 14 to 15, and in 2003 the State-Regions Congress introduced experimental vocational and training programmes (IFP). These intensive changes allow for the comparison of these two interventions in a single context one after the other, but no extensive studies have been made so far. The dissertation seeks to address this lacuna by making the best use of the available data. The broad question of the thesis is whether the extension of compulsory schooling and/or the creation of new vocational and training programmes have modified students’ (and families’) dropping-out decisions. To answer, propensity score matching, counterfactual time series, segmented regression, region fixed effect and individual multilevel cross-classified logistic analyses are used. The results are framed in the theoretical debates about education: its roles, its expansion, its contribute to (in)equality and its policies.

La tesi presenta l’analisi relazionale di una Organizzazione di Terzo settore. La ricerca, di stampo qualitativo, si è posta nell’ottica di proseguire nell’approfondimento teorico-metodologico dell’approccio relazionale al Lavoro sociale di rete. Il caso studiato è rappresentato dai Centri di Ascolto di Caritas Ambrosiana, organizzazioni che si trovano in prima linea nel fronteggiamento dei problemi sociali e comunitari. Finalità della ricerca è stata comprendere in che modo le strategie organizzative possono promuovere, o meno, l’adozione di un approccio relazionale al lavoro sociale da parte dei propri operatori impegnati sul campo. Le Organizzazioni di Welfare esprimono relazionalità nella misura in cui i loro attori sono orientati reciprocamente e nei confronti dei destinatari dei loro interventi. L’analisi è stata condotta a tre livelli di definizione delle policy, management e fieldwork, a partire da alcune definizioni di organizzazione che ne mettono in luce i fattori costitutivi quali finalità, personale, strumenti e processi operativi. Per ciascuno di questi fattori organizzativi si sono verificate le dimensioni di relazionalità presenti sia nei contenuti, sia nei processi di definizione degli stessi. Gi studi teorico-metodologici sul lavoro sociale di rete (Folgheraiter 1998; 2007) hanno fornito i riferimenti scientifici per condurre tale analisi relazionale dell’organizzazione dei Centri di Ascolto.
The thesis is a relational analysis of a non-profit organization. The qualitative research has the aim to continue the study of the theoretical and methodological approach of the relational social work. The case study is represented by Counseling Centres of Caritas Ambrosiana (Milan), that are organizations in frontline to cope with the social and community problems. The purpose of the research was to understand how organizational strategies facilitate the practitioners to work in a relational way. The analysis was conducted at three levels: policy making, management and fieldwork. The analysis starts from some definitions of organization that highlight the elements constituting the organizations such as purpose, staff, tools and processes. For each of these organizational elements, the researcher has studied the characteristics of relationality in the content and in the processes for their definition. The theoretical and methodological studies of relational social work (Folgheraiter 1998, 2007) have provided the scientific references to conduct that relational analysis of these organizations.

La tesi presenta l’analisi relazionale di una Organizzazione di Terzo settore. La ricerca, di stampo qualitativo, si è posta nell’ottica di proseguire nell’approfondimento teorico-metodologico dell’approccio relazionale al Lavoro sociale di rete. Il caso studiato è rappresentato dai Centri di Ascolto di Caritas Ambrosiana, organizzazioni che si trovano in prima linea nel fronteggiamento dei problemi sociali e comunitari. Finalità della ricerca è stata comprendere in che modo le strategie organizzative possono promuovere, o meno, l’adozione di un approccio relazionale al lavoro sociale da parte dei propri operatori impegnati sul campo. Le Organizzazioni di Welfare esprimono relazionalità nella misura in cui i loro attori sono orientati reciprocamente e nei confronti dei destinatari dei loro interventi. L’analisi è stata condotta a tre livelli di definizione delle policy, management e fieldwork, a partire da alcune definizioni di organizzazione che ne mettono in luce i fattori costitutivi quali finalità, personale, strumenti e processi operativi. Per ciascuno di questi fattori organizzativi si sono verificate le dimensioni di relazionalità presenti sia nei contenuti, sia nei processi di definizione degli stessi. Gi studi teorico-metodologici sul lavoro sociale di rete (Folgheraiter 1998; 2007) hanno fornito i riferimenti scientifici per condurre tale analisi relazionale dell’organizzazione dei Centri di Ascolto.
The thesis is a relational analysis of a non-profit organization. The qualitative research has the aim to continue the study of the theoretical and methodological approach of the relational social work. The case study is represented by Counseling Centres of Caritas Ambrosiana (Milan), that are organizations in frontline to cope with the social and community problems. The purpose of the research was to understand how organizational strategies facilitate the practitioners to work in a relational way. The analysis was conducted at three levels: policy making, management and fieldwork. The analysis starts from some definitions of organization that highlight the elements constituting the organizations such as purpose, staff, tools and processes. For each of these organizational elements, the researcher has studied the characteristics of relationality in the content and in the processes for their definition. The theoretical and methodological studies of relational social work (Folgheraiter 1998, 2007) have provided the scientific references to conduct that relational analysis of these organizations.

the research aims to investigate the polycentric structure of Genoa with respect to the current situation. The main question is about its identity, tryinfg to understand whether, in the light of current transformations, it is more appropriate to define Genoa as a polycentric city or, rather, a city with many centers. To this end, the research will also try to critically reconsider the most widespread and shared model of urban polycentrism, based on specific characteristics and linked to the creation of new centralities able of attract new inhabitants of the creative upper class, proposing instead an alternative reading to the current dominant, based on the idea that the concept of polycentrism does not represent a univocal formula, applicable and desirable in the same way everywhere, assuming, rather, different conformations and multiple meanings, in relation to the different contextual realities in which it could take shape.